“... Horizontal Iwasawa Theory and the Shimura-Taniyama conjecture and, excluded from such arcana, may be left wondering about the whole business of proving theorems, and about the mysteriously powerful attraction these problems have. Surely, something more than symbolic game-playing is involved. Certainly, mathematicians see themselves as frying much grander ...”

“... from across dangerous places, the deep ditch of a sunk fence, etc – so that the children may destroy themselves, lose themselves, by responding, by getting into their power. So long as the children are kept from them, they are not lost; but they try and try, these evil presences, to get hold of them. It is a question of the children “coming over to ...”

“... ourselves.In looking to the deep future, Farrier considers ‘how we will appear to the people who may live in that world’. I wonder if the concept of fossils will mean anything to them. If they find marks in the mud that don’t make sense, will they try to explain them? The book starts in Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast, a place that is being violently ...”

“... was reached in 2013, on David Cameron’s watch, an achievement regarded with pride. Theresa May, on the eve of her departure from Downing Street, went out of her way to reaffirm the commitment. Even Boris Johnson is standing by it – for now. The promise that DFID will remain a separate government department with a ring-fenced budget ...”

“... in his lifetime – new discoveries or dramatic revisions to previous orthodoxies. He may have been the first to place the pre-Socratics, whose work was just being edited, in a history of philosophy that also included Darwin and Hegel. He combined the latest discoveries of ‘scientific’ archaeology with Winckelmann’s repertoire of celebrated ...”

“... and – by extension – show how much these fresh voices are needed to shake it up.Instapoetry may be the work of a moment, its defenders say, but its fidelity to the feeling of that moment – in whatever shapeless guise – is what distinguishes it from ‘traditional’ poetry with its thought and artifice, its respect for time and second thoughts. Leav ...”

“... in Quadraat, so in Amia Srinivasan’s piece in this issue (and in those square brackets) you may spot the intrusion of the typographically similar Minion Pro.*The Type Archive is full of unexpected delights (when the original renovations were being made a number of bowler hats were discovered above a false ceiling). It has never had the money or the ...”

“... so much the wound but the dream,’ the poet Victoria Adukwei Bulley has remarked. White readers may see the wound but miss the dream, see the struggle but miss – or misunderstand – the tenderness. (Tenderness can mean gentleness and affection, but also sensitivity to pain.) When ‘the president, the mayor or any other politician’ applauds the ...”

“... traditional, expository narrative mode and great-man accounts of battles and high politics may seem uncontroversial. But in September last year, shortly after its release in hardback, God’s Shadow became the subject of a Twitter storm. Three academics – Cornell Fleischer and Cemal Kafadar, both Ottomanists, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, a global ...”

“... cast-iron components. The station was due to open on the same day as the Crystal Palace – 1 May 1851 – but was delayed by two weeks, an inauspicious start for a railway station. It was pretty basic: two lines and two platforms, linked to a swing bridge which took the trains over the Sheepwash Channel, linking the Thames and the canal. The bridge’s ...”

“... democratisation of intellectual culture because many of the non-intellectuals was none of it. We may still be living through the reaction to the 19th-century pattern of middle-class attempts to impose on those below patterns of recreation which were docile, rational and not self-destructive, to wean them from drink and badger-baiting to ...”

“... laws on social media platforms have brought warnings from Facebook, Twitter and Google that they may have to withdraw their sites (that is, if they aren’t blocked). Two years ago almost no one was talking about independence; now everyone knows the chant ‘Hong Kong independence – the only way out’. National security, another non-issue before 2019, is ...”

“... form of headgear as one involving constraint and loss. But the poem also hints that there may be a difference between the perspective of the girl herself and that of her father, who wants her to produce offspring to continue his line.Alicia and I both have tween daughters. They were not with us on the trip, but it was easy to imagine them scrambling ...”

“... more authentically with the photographer, and the subject, when we view it in colour’. Maybe. It may also make us less scrupulous and more sentimental, disinclined to think outside the frame. Sharing isn’t always caring. One thing we do know for sure is that huge numbers of us have handed over our own memories to a corporation, and that it wants us to ...”

“... the money machines, the America’s Cup, and, of course, the ocean would still be here. It may be stretching a point but could the return of the trusting cahows, who befriended those early mariners and were then killed out of hand, be seen as a good omen for Bermuda? And, by extension, for all of us? It is now the island’s national bird. It is being ...”