“... hunt took the opportunity to stock up on game. The tourist office of the Lozère département may not be the first to try to profit from the beast. Smith mentions one wolf killing in order to demonstrate the hunter d’Enneval’s ‘contempt for the local inhabitants’. The dead wolf proved to contain fragments of cloth and bone. The bone had probably ...”

“... of public finance. On top of that, the neoliberal Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership may soon force all public health services in the UK – Scottish as well as English – to invite competition from American private firms. This ravenous alien was only able to squirm into the UK spaceship because in 2012 Cameron’s coalition had already ...”

“... would occupy too great an emotional space in my life and leave no room for other things which may also have been destined for me. These are the thoughts of a man who is in exile from a civilisation that no longer exists, and will be condemned, eventually, to extinction. Because of his preoccupation with memory and his fondness for long sentences, Gazdanov ...”

“... had died. At the end of the book, he suggests – foolishly or disingenuously – that corpses may have been brought to the hospital from somewhere else. Sheri Fink wasn’t at Memorial during the hurricane, but she has interviewed hundreds of people who were, first for the website ProPublica and for the New York Times, now for her unsettling and excellent ...”

“... textual and editorial matters. This is everything one could ask for in a scholarly edition. There may be room to question the inclusion of The True Levellers Standard Advanced or A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England as works written by Winstanley alone, but the editors’ informed reasoning must command respect. Their introduction ...”

“... these might sound like mere ‘chattering’. All of which is to say that the readers of the LRB may have some common sense after ...”

“... to find examples of such things as female networking. The word ‘gender’ does not appear. This may be no bad thing, but Castor’s readers would have had a better idea of the ‘individual experiences’ of the women she writes about if she had included a fuller discussion of the nature of medieval queenship. Central to that was the queen’s ...”

“... but under lens-filter or colourwash buildings withstood innovation, each a pickled Piper come what may. When the then queen directed his attention to the wisteria in the Frogmore gardens in Windsor Great Park as an excellent subject for his pen and wash, Piper responded politely but retreated to the rooftops, where he found aspects of Windsor Castle more to ...”

“... than they do with their countries’ middle classes. And while ‘l’exception française’ may still mean something to those in the middle, there is little sign of it in the world documented by Aubenas. Perhaps she has hit on the exception to the ...”

“... Bulgaria, Italy, Colombia, the United States, Britain and many other countries where local groups may be interested in buying or selling their products, or laundering their money. The Russians will have a presence there but are unlikely to be the dominant group in the territory. Organised crime is now a huge presence in the global economy. It is parasitic but ...”

“... more than a figure of speech. Hamid’s decision to structure an angry book in such a gimmicky way may seem odd at first. Gimmicks are typically a tool of the kind of capitalism Hamid attacks, drawing attention to the surface while disguising the vacuum below. But it’s clear enough that we’re supposed to feel frustrated by the gimmick, or at least to feel ...”

“... or fidelity. There is everything to be said for going out on a limb, but the risk is that we may think we are further out than we are, and sometimes the strangest place will not be the furthest out but the furthest in. This is the case with the extraordinary story by Kenji Miyazawa. It works wonderfully well in all three versions I can read (by David ...”

“... can seem like a surprising next step after Nostalgia, whatever stylistic qualities the two books may share. Nostalgia describes a multiple, uncertain, open-ended world while Blinding expands inward, plumbing the infinite depths of an individual imagination. It’s as though Cărtărescu has chosen to withdraw from any topical literary or cultural ...”

“... and indigenous populations interacted and co-operated’. The symbolism each assigned to fire may offer some insight into the cultural gulf dividing Rome and Carthage. For Romans, fire was negative, destructive – hence the immolation of Carthage by Scipio. For the Phoenicians, it was restorative, purifying, necessary to generate rebirth. In his ...”

“... But as Michael Quinton suggests in his ‘World Wide Words’ note on the internet, the reference may well be to another Isabella and another siege, the siege of Granada by Ferdinand and Isabella that ended in 1492 (this one lasted eight months – quite long enough for the purpose). A more prosaic derivation could be that the word comes from the Arabic izah ...”