“... hate you, you fucking anti-feminist bitch’ is about the most printable. Angry young men may have been the first Netizens, but the medium obviously offers women a safe and irresistible outlet for verbal violence. These days, I’m also getting hate mail from radical graduate students who don’t like what I write, as this year’s president, in my ...”

“... of the West. The territorial divisions agreed between the Great Powers after the First World War may be arbitrary, but in the modern world, territorial units are meshed into an international system and it is the primary interest of the élites controlling those units to weld them into states using whatever force is necessary and the best available ...”

“... Some, like ‘Aesthetics of Comedy Asleep’, are mere squibs: ‘Don’t wake the clown/Or he may knock you down.’ Others like the witty ‘Aesthetics of Surrealism’ – ‘To find the impossible/With breasts’ – are near-Wildean aphorisms which simply flash by. But however substantial they are, all of the pieces, like tasty canapés, can be ...”

“... yet another Oxford anthology of British literature. Or, doing the work in Tucson, Arizona, he may have wanted to dissent from the pious demarcations of literature in which he was officially involved: The analogue between 1900-05 and the Eighties, which have all too readily developed their own style, is obvious: we still tend to enjoy the Englishness of ...”

“... Netizens of Douban (a major website forum where people rate and discuss books, movies and music) may remember that during the PRC’s 70th anniversary celebrations in 2019, some ‘patriot’ groups (‘melon group’ and ‘big ship group’) got overexcited and started to ‘couple’ Chinese leaders. Practised at dodging censorship, they used ...”

“... the point is rather that he is actively hostile to the idea that the real substance of our lives may be unique. Pinkney refers to Williams’ novel Loyalties, * where the Communist Emma Broase puts the point briskly: ‘You see ... it is this Freudian stuff. Subjectivity before class, it’ the whole post-war rot.’ Suspicious of the tentative uncertainties ...”

“... the enemy of churches. The Salisbury diocese has a history of wrong-headed deans. These gentlemen may have been top god-botherers but that was no reason to let them loose on one of the finest buildings in the world (exterior only). Thirty years ago, Hugh Dickinson proposed knocking down a Grade 1 listed wall to admit tourist coaches and so increase revenue ...”

“... have come of them. According to Alex Egbona, a member of the House of Representatives, as of last May only two were anywhere near completion. In August last year, Timipre Sylva, the minister for petroleum resources, said that ‘we have licensed quite a bit.’ He was ‘not in a position to give an exact figure now’ but was confident that ‘a few of these ...”

“... made common cause. The Imperial College entomologist Harold Lefroy founded Rentokil, and may have been the first ‘research entrepreneur’ of the kind Mrs Thatcher wished all scientists to become. Sadly, on 10 October 1925, Lefroy was overcome by fumes while experimenting on a gas of his own invention, and never enjoyed the fruits of his ...”

“... and will drop from the ceiling onto their victims. We are not prepared to say how much of this may be due to popular superstition.’ The report was produced because ‘the infestation of new council houses has become a matter of concern to Local Authorities who are responsible for their maintenance and management.’ Whether bugs became common in these ...”

“... Barrett can be when he gives his characters permission to cut loose. Rory, Eustace and Bimbo may have ‘bloodshot eyes, pouched necks and capitulating hairlines’, but there’s a big difference between them and most of the other characters in this collection: ‘the Alps still felt young in their ...”

“... of Funding, which draws its members from the Palestinian arts community and cultural NGOs. On 28 May, in the single most serious episode of this affair, the rooms where the group was due to exhibit were raided and defaced with cryptic death threats, including the number 187, which is sometimes used in the US to refer to murder. A month after the opening, the ...”

“... a protective chapel ‘evokes sanctuary in a paradoxical, self-cancelling form’. The connection may seem far-fetched, but Gawain raises questions about the meaning of sanctuary vis-à-vis the natural world. Like the miracle of the stag, it asks whether human institutions such as kingship, covenant and sanctuary can extend their reach into the realm of ...”

“... to sleep right through. Our own sleep patterns are profoundly artificial and unnatural, which may be why so many of us need sleeping pills to get what we think of as a good night’s sleep. Ekirch’s first chapter is on the ‘terrors of the night’. In 1594 Thomas Nashe, the collaborator of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson, published a little ...”

“... advantage gained substantial enough, to justify the price. Hull admits that such calculations may seem ‘macabre’, but they are intrinsic to the legal case. An argument could be made that the blockade met that standard; significantly, too, Britain worked to mitigate criticism from non-combatant states by promising to uphold neutral property rights, to ...”