“... It seems that he doesn’t intend to retire to his palace any time soon. But playing the long game may not be the best strategy: a sizeable proportion of the protesters have been in their twenties or teens – people born and raised entirely under Putin’s rule, for whom the spectre of chaos the Kremlin so often invokes is less fearsome than a future of ...”

“... kicking the Community out, rather than bringing them their post and picking up their rubbish?This may seem like nit-picking, but it is a natural response to Cook’s conspicuous efforts at world-building, and specifically her attempts to forestall any objections the reader might have. Agnes can’t ‘coo’ into an imaginary mirror without an ...”

“... response to the Eastern Europeans’ understandable desire for cheap jabs).Von der Leyen may not have been so perfect, after all. Like many commission figures she is a national has-been. Once considered a potential successor to Merkel as chancellor (and candidate for the German presidency), she became marginal a decade ago. Postwar German politicians ...”

“... wasn’t what it used to be, and I shouldn’t expect to hear from anyone that year. It was May. In twelve months, eighteen months, he said, someone would offer me a date for surgery.Twelve months seemed unfathomable. If I had been hit by a car, they would have treated me right away. But afterwards I thought that even eighteen lost months were less ...”

“... criminal law’, amounting to a war crime. But far from deterring Israeli actions, such statements may as well have been a ‘to do’ list for the IDF. The ICC prosecutor will be spoilt for choice.Israel responds that since Hamas’s declared intention is to destroy it, Israel’s right of self-defence extends to the destruction of Hamas, regardless of the ...”

“... being shot by a British firing squad. Connolly was one of the fifteen rebel leaders executed in May 1916 for their part in the Easter Rising, when at least 1200 rebels battled the British forces in Dublin for six days with the aim of establishing an Irish republic. The rebellion led to a wave of arrests, mainly of innocent people, as well as around 450 ...”

“... Some of these experiments – on people who were rarely in any position to resist – may now appear justified. Ronald Ross, a British doctor, carried out some of his research on the relationship between mosquitoes and malaria in the penal colony on the Andaman Islands, work that helped win him a Nobel Prize in 1902. ‘With tears and toiling ...”

“... game was up. I’m like Grampa Simpson in the meme: Old man yells at cloud. One of these days I may even start using relatable myself.The most profound recent generational change, for Duffy, has nothing to do with technology: delayed adulthood. Important life stages, such as leaving home, getting a stable job and moving into a place of one’s own, are ...”

“... of God. If the idea of God is a god – to recognise our friends is a god, said Euripides – we may call it the Good, Plato’s Form above all Forms. To see the Good is to love it, and to love it is to be ruled by it, and to be ruled by it is to be within it since it enfolds all partial goods, including oneself. (In the real world nobody is entirely ...”

“... celebration of books. Jackson, an almost comically prolific author (I count 46 titles, but there may be more), has a seemingly total range and charges across many of the topics Cummings explores: libraries, collecting, catalogues, books as charms and amulets, books as bodies, prison reading, burying books, book eating, fires and destruction. Jackson is ...”

“... ceding of ground, Kunle is struck by a sense that ‘the cause he’s been unwillingly roped into may actually be a good one.’ But soon afterwards, conscious that the people now killing one another were good neighbours just a few weeks ago, ‘he feels a sudden force pulling him away from his resolve to stick with his comrades … And in the misery, the ...”

“... This wasn’t a time of ‘investor-citizens’ but of ‘investor-consumers’; their emergence may have been accelerated by the Thatcher government, but it was essentially the result of changes in the structure of capitalism.The rise of financial consumerism was shaped by a supply-side logic. Companies struggled to make a profit by catering to small ...”

“... or administer CPR. But his account of the discipline is anachronistic. Conceptual analysis may have been central to analytic philosophy in the mid-20th century, and there are doubtless still a few diehards. But, at least since Kripke, most philosophers have turned away from the analysis of concepts and towards the metaphysical investigation of things ...”

“... of Mr Terry’s ‘Fireplace with Waterfall’.Jewell’s assumption that Oppenheim was a man may explain his unruffled response to Object, whose provocations slid beneath his notice: the pelt of the upturned cup, which both invites and repels touch; the spoon, phallic or digital; the saucer, a speckled disc of hair pressed down by the weight of the ...”

“... When you pour hot coffee in it the pope appears in the sky! So dear heart – my new address as of May 20 – will be . . . * Cioran & Hazlitt have lots to say about envy, writers’. It’s pretty scary. What makes it scarier is that often ‘They’ put you down & haven’t even read your work. Like Gide with little Marcel. Didn’t even open the ms. I ...”