“... these things tend to do, in perhaps three or four years’ time. And perhaps by that time, too, we may have learned the reasons for the bizarre decision taken by Neil Kinnock and the Labour Party Executive. So far, we have been given no reason for the decision. Was it the fear of being accused of setting up some kind of Zhdanovite Ministry of Culture? Why then ...”

“... Becket shows us a man whose origins, like William’s, were not of the highest: his father ‘may have been in textiles’. Like William, Thomas owed his rise, not to inheritance, but to his being sent to the household of a distant and more powerful relative: that of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury. As a clerk, though not yet a priest, and Chancellor ...”

“... Jim Dixon. For anyone who has actually worked at the BL, the sequence of events and topography may be plausible enough, but the pace is nothing short of absurd. Things, interesting things at least, simply don’t happen that fast in that place. But Williams is a narrator in a hurry and plausibility goes overboard. On the strength of his single day’s ...”

“... the Manchus. The ‘sustained and withering artillery techniques’ that Wakeman ascribes to them may be an overstatement, but he does give some vivid examples of the successful use of cannon fire against walled cities or massed troops in a range of battles from Yuzizhang in north China down to Guangzhou in the far south-east. The thorough documentation that ...”

“... metaphysics from its throne with the gentle mockery implied by the principle of tolerance. We may make our comprehensive and philosophical theories of the world as we choose, subject to the constraints of consistency and economy. The natural sciences within their specialised domains are constrained by their experiments and their observations. Philosophers ...”

“... Clifford, Kingsley, Newman, Dr Martineau, Mill, Matthew Arnold – he docketed them all.’ It may be thought that Hutton was somehow too solid, too Olympian in his criticism, too unfaultable, to be endearing or to engage our full attention. He measures his subjects against a standard which seems always just beyond reach of their best efforts. Even ...”

“... forces have unpredictable consequences; for instance, the invisible hand of the market may lead to my failure and my neighbour’s success, even if I work much harder and am much more intelligent). Contrary to appearances, these mechanisms don’t contest or threaten hierarchy, but make it palatable, since ‘what triggers the turmoil of envy is ...”

“... creaky standbys of literary form is so ludicrously foregrounded that the critical reader may perceive it as a kind of threat: a cuff on the shoulder, a meaty finger to the chest. Are ya in, the novel seems to be asking in its opening pages, or are ya out? It’s very hard not to be in. Harbach is a solid writer, inoffensively funny, pretty good at ...”

“... surprising. Determining the ‘source’ of a river is, it turns out, not a simple matter. There may be many plausible contenders. You can argue that it is the joining together and accumulation of the water from a number of tributaries that constitutes the ‘source’, not any one of them in particular. This issue gave pause even to Victorian explorers, not ...”

“... Florian’s fable ‘La Carpe et les carpillons’, about disobedient and thoughtless children, may also have come into it. The sisters’ studies at the pensionnat ended abruptly in November 1842, when they returned to Haworth on hearing that their Aunt Branwell had died. In January 1843, Charlotte went back to Brussels, without Emily, to become an English ...”

“... groups or clandestine agents’. The alleged collusion between Saddam Hussein and Zarqawi may have been an invention, but this type of collusion is widespread, from the CIA’s backing of Central American death squads to the anti-FARC paramilitaries sponsored by the Colombian state. The problem with trying to assess the epistemological status of ...”

“... clear enough: ‘No, it’s not, you’re right.’ This is not quite what the line says, and we may feel invited to wonder about the slippage. Perhaps the speaker isn’t entirely sure that this poem is sufficiently unlike that poem after all, or that a mere lack of resemblance is enough of a merit. On the previous page there is a prose epigram that makes ...”

“... debonair capriciousness gets reduced to a shrugging jemenfoutisme. These precious, vapid fumblings may well have conformed to his personal creed of ‘sincerity’, but they dissipate the exhibition’s energy level. Somewhere in between, however, a portrait might record a painter’s debates with himself. The head of Henri Rochefort – another, edgier, more ...”

“... critique of the exploitation of children at the hands of the rapacious music industry, but he may have lost sight of the real tragedy of Bieber. More than any other pop star before him, Bieber gives the impression of an alarm system sounding a series of warnings for a doomed adulthood. His hypothetical backstage suffering is less interesting than the ...”

“... curiosity and acquisitiveness as well as horror and pity. ‘I came to understand that we may look to the powerful and potent symbolic and symbiotic relationships between big and small as a means to understand … how and why we construct the world around us.’ So she maps the fantastic imagination onto actual instances of out of the ordinary bodies ...”