“... comfort. But it takes us away from the question of how to avoid the worst in the here and now. It may be true that Democrats in their current configuration cannot constitute a truly progressive governing bloc. It may also be true that, without that bloc, many ambitious reforms will be thwarted whenever they do gain ...”

“... did the same, but there was no response and the Jumbotron remained in place until Thursday, 2 May. ‘I have to put a trigger warning in my syllabus when I teach Margaret Atwood,’ one colleague said, ‘or the university will discipline me. But we all have to listen to this for days?’ The last few years of mealy-mouthed catering to both student ...”

“... has long been recognised. If I say ‘I’m tired,’ and you say ‘I’m tired,’ then I may have said something true and you something false, so that we can’t have said ‘exactly the same thing’. But we can attribute a constant conventional significance to words like ‘I’ (and ‘now’ and ‘that cat’) even though they are used to ...”

“... of personal satire’. Wrangham was less squeamish. He retained a manuscript of the poem until May 1822, when he approached William Blackwood seeking publication of ‘some splendid fragments’ to which he had contributed as ‘a very humble adjunct’ to the principal author: ‘a Friend of mine who now ranks in the very foremost of the poetical ...”

“... her, Tim Heald nevertheless persuaded a publisher to commission him to write another one. She may have been, as he says, ‘a classic also-ran, second best’ and finally ‘a sad and enfeebled elderly woman in a wheelchair’, but Heald based his argument for yet another biography on the view he claims the world has had of her since her death as ‘a ...”

“... magnificence of the Wallace Collection (then about to open). Some of the objects at Poynton may have been treasured for three or four centuries, but the old Venetian velvets, the chests with ormolu mounts (‘brasses that Louis Quinze may have thumbed’), many of the old chairs and cabinets, the ‘panels and the ...”

“... his own work (‘unknown to fewer’); and ‘withdrawal’ itself, in more senses than one, may be the source and condition of that melancholia which gave Burton his great Anatomy while destroying the man himself.The dedicatory inscription of Q (as the 1609 Quarto edition of the Sonnets is known to scholars) lacks this learned or clerical economy. But ...”

“... In opposition, Harold Wilson spoke out against American involvement in Vietnam. In May 1954, during his Bevanite phase, he declared that ‘not a man, not a gun, must be sent from this country to defend French colonisation in Indo-China … we must not join or in any way encourage an anti-Communist crusade in Asia under the leadership of the Americans or anyone else ...”

“... are peculiarly portable. They can be lifted from one interpretative situation to another, and may change their meaning in the course of this migration. Waiting for Godot as performed in San Quentin prison is not quite the same play as Peter Hall’s first London production. We cannot simply put Auschwitz out of our minds while watching The Merchant of ...”

“... I’ll use it – measuring everything that exists I can compare with Zeus nothing except Zeus. May he take this weight from my heart … Zeus put mortals on the road to wisdom when he laid down this law:By suffering we learn … ‘Whoever Zeus is’; ‘I can/compare with Zeus nothing/except Zeus.’ Elsewhere the same chorus says, ‘Zeus acts as Zeus ...”

“... in the pulp magazines dedicated to horror, unease and thrills. Though the zombies’ heritage may derive from the Caribbean, they have certainly long since ‘gone global’: the film series Resident Evil, one of the most popular manifestations of the zombie, began life as a Japanese video game; the grisliest films in the field are Italian; and there’s ...”

“... copied by generations of scholars and students up until the early 20th century. Today its facts may appear to be fossils, but even a compendium of seemingly obsolete knowledge has much to reveal about the context in which it was produced. What is significant when taking stock of the entire universe? What does one see? In al-Nuwayri’s world, lightning is ...”

“... true! It’s all fiction!’This ghoulish bedtime reading, which failed to cure my sleeplessness, may seem very much of our time. But The Tempest opens with a similar dialogue. Replace ‘pilot’ with ‘boatswain’, ‘trim servo’ and ‘autopilot aural warning’ with ‘topsail’ and ‘master’s whistle’, 20th-century howls with ...”

“... paper reported that a new channel, GB News, to be led by Robbie Gibb, a former adviser to Theresa May, was granted a preliminary Ofcom licence in January, and hopes to launch next year. Gibb, who before working at Number Ten had held senior roles in BBC politics programming, has since become a dedicated critic of the corporation’s alleged cultural and ...”

“... sustainable competition’. But the Johnson government hasn’t yet indicated what compromises it may be willing to make, or what its new competition policy might look like. For many supporters of Brexit, taking power back from Brussels wasn’t supposed to be an end in itself, but a means to the end of rolling back the regulations imposed on the UK by ...”