“... ever. In the event of a hat-trick for the Conservatives, the Nuffield study of the next election may well conclude that Simon Hughes’s Conference intervention was the first decisive move towards the result. This prognosis could be a reason for opting out, but it isn’t one that Kilroy gives. If you think you have won – and Kilroy, after all, claims a ...”

“... Mum, merrily and sexily, with a hairbrush. Hence the dustpan brush. However implausible we may find this amateur psychoanalysis, we cannot dismiss the story airily, for it seems to refer embarrassingly to a real-life case-history. Ruth is said to have painted a good picture, hung at the Royal Academy, depicting ‘two moth-eaten 18th-century dolls ...”

“... chest – and then three days later returned and put his own heart in its place. On 20 May 1619, the stakes, already high, suddenly became much higher. Jesus appeared to Benedetta and told her that he wished to marry her. Moreover, he had precise and rather elaborate ideas for the procession, the decorations in the chapel, the ceremony itself, even ...”

“... Center that the Rockefellers first commissioned, then destroyed, are now at MoMA again (until 14 May). At the time the show opened, Rivera was acknowledged, along with David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco, as a leader of Mexican muralism, which was supported by the new government of Alvaro Obregón as a way to promote a transformed sense of ...”

“... painting of the moon in its successive movements, rising and falling over a polar landscape. That may have been a pure coincidence (nobody can remember) and in any case the piece advertised on the rubric – it was the first issue of 1997 – was Alan Bennett’s ‘What I did in 1996.’ One thing Bennett didn’t do was skate to ...”

“... Hamilton Stark, Banks describes the type: ‘A rube! A citizen of the provinces, a man whose life may well be incapable of offering posterity a single slice of cheese more than his particular sociology! How mere.’ Banks is not a witty writer, but he is alive to the slapstick of his characters. They tend to smoke (Menthols), and to be a bit bigoted ...”

“... Negro in a boat driven by a deaf-mute Indian boy, arriving after dark at the Lakashi village. You may have spotted one or two errors in the previous paragraph. Maybe the factual mistakes don’t really matter – it’s a novel not a textbook – but reading State of Wonder you get the strong impression that, for Patchett, the world outside North America ...”

“... as best we can?’ If these are the questions of ‘quiet, gentle, unassuming faith’, we may wonder what is in store for us from the less gentle versions of Christianity. Perhaps Scruton is warning us of something. In Spufford’s version, Christianity, with its insistence on what people are feeling, comes close to sounding like a version of the more ...”

“... much as seeking answers, and some of these possibilities are fascinating, whatever our scepticism may be about the larger project. Robert Nozick is cited (twice) as producing the elegant suggestion that we don’t have to choose between presence and absence, or between Heidegger’s Seiendes and Nichts, since we could have both, eventually (perhaps ‘the ...”

“... why so many Pakistanis want to become members of one of the five parliamentary assemblies. On 11 May, having been governed for five years by the PPP, the country voted to replace the filthy rich Zardari and his gang with the filthy rich Sharif brothers and their gang. Many of the parliamentarians seem frightening and powerful figures back home: a land-grab ...”

“... full of bankers. 6. They put prices up during the festival. 7. They think they’re great. You may be glad to learn that Crawford’s book is a little more discursive, open-minded and generally responsive to the idea that there might be great things to be said about both cities, but for some reason my eye kept digging out the more deadly quotes. In ...”

“... driven man and he agonised. His remit was to save an elite. What about the others? At the end of May, 1941, he wrote afterwards, ‘we found that in less than eight months over 15,000 people had come to us or written to us … We had decided that 1800 of the cases fell within the scope of our activities. In other words these 1800 were genuine cases of ...”

“... co-author, with Althusser, of Reading ‘Capital’ (1965), but broke with him over the revolts of May 1968: Althusser took the Party line, accusing the participants of ‘infantile leftism’. For Rancière ‘the lesson of Althusser’ (the title of his 1969 critique of his former mentor) was elitist in its theoretical focus on the ‘scientific’ Marx. As ...”

“... a lot harder at this issue. As it is, there is some reason to believe that Goldman’s heyday may be over. Higher capital requirements and restrictions on trading activities, combined with anaemic economic growth are denting its profitability: in the last three months it lost money for only the second time since going public, and its share price is back ...”

“... it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows.’ It was May Sinclair who applied the term ‘stream of consciousness’ to fiction (it’s unclear whether or not she had James’s definition in mind), in a review of the first three volumes of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage in 1918. Richardson wasn’t ...”