“... to mean ‘compulsive scribbling’, unaware that a cacoethes was in fact a malignant tumour; he may claim the forgiveness of all who suppose that an inferiority complex is the mark of a wimp or that a quantum leap is long. One of the easier mistakes in translating from a foreign language is giving a word the sense most familiar in one’s own day. It is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... group – among them, its leader, Donald DeFreeze – died in a Los Angeles police shoot-out in May 1974, and a further three (including Hearst) were arrested 14 months later. Escaping arrest, Soliah had gone underground, changed her name to Sara Jane Olson and built a new life for herself as the wife of a suburban doctor. In December 2001, she was ...”

“... of being labelled. Stereotypes, however, are not always pejorative, whatever these authors may think. They write in their preface of the ways that ‘deeply ingrained stereotypes shed negative light on a wide range of populations and communities’; but the assumption that all such typecasting is negative is itself a postmodern stereotype. The Welsh do ...”

“... was later translated into Old English, and further expanded by his near namesake Aelfric Bata, who may have been schoolmaster at Christ Church, Canterbury, and who wrote Colloquia of his own. Despite these admirable efforts, Latin was and remained a hard language to master. Reading some of Orme’s examples, one begins to wonder how anyone ever learned ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a zoophile on every committee won’t bring the New Jerusalem any closer. Assimilating more people may be a way of extending the sway of the system, not of transforming it. Anyway, when it comes to allowing serial child abusers to become schoolteachers, Sam Goldwyn’s legendary cry of ‘Include me out!’ has a point. Who decides who is to be included? And ...”

“... an ancestral cousin of smallpox, has been found in Viking-era burials in northern Europe, and it may have been this or something like it that affected the Romans.As Elliott notes, the smallpox theory is largely responsible for the scholarly consensus that the Antonine Plague was a very big deal: modern smallpox killed a third of its victims – between 300 ...”

“... of fuel for most of its vehicles in southern Gaza, limiting its ability to maintain order. On 7 May, World Central Kitchen, which had been delivering millions of meals to Gaza, ran out of provisions; on 12 May the World Health Organisation said it was running very low on medical supplies. During this period Israel ...”

“... with certain (white) cultural and political assumptions and connotations built in, some of which may be directly in conflict with the sort of experience the (black) writer wants to convey. How can a writer’s parole (individual speech or writing) make any headway against langue (the language system)? The problem is exactly analogous to that faced by ...”