“... Voyaging”.’ These metaphors are too neatly aligned with their meanings. A woman may indeed decide to make alterations to her house after a separation, but the symbolism involved in hollowing out its insides and keeping the front intact is too obvious, as is the business of the German rocket and the German family history or the church overrun ...”

“... parties on the Continent. The issue today is not how to be social democratic, much as this may agitate the victims of adversary politics. The issue is what comes after Social Democracy ... [It] will have to be an imaginative, unorthodox and distinctive liberalism which combines the common ground with the new horizons of the future of liberty, Unlike ...”

“... theoretical quest through Leviticus and the Gospels, Mary Douglas, Freud and Winnicott. It may be optimistic to expect a corresponding virtuosity from the British reader. But can we join in the debate at any other ...”

“... style tells heavily against him here. That neither Ruth nor her husband come across as real people may be ascribed to a simple lack of literary skill, but when Schatzman describes Ruth as having a dream in which she tells him that her anger ‘is like a great big ball of fire’, in which she asks her husband, ‘Could you love me when I’m full of hate and ...”

“... dimension is, to a greater or lesser extent, almost always there. On the surface his novels may be about uncovering a German spy ring, circumventing a worldwide conspiracy, or freeing a rich Danish recluse from blackmailers, but beyond this they are voyages of self-discovery, quests for self-knowledge, searchings for one’s soul, ending in regeneration ...”

“... a double act. Yet, as Conrad observes in Heart of Darkness, we die as we dream, alone. The thought may have occurred to the comedian-novelist that at death’s door he wasn’t, for once, dancing off into the blue with his little hairy-legged friend. That there are other provocative links between Eric and Sid is strongly suggested by various tricks in the ...”

“... bothered about ‘well-formed syntax, conventions of punctuation or elegance of vocabulary’. She may not always understand her emotions, but she is direct about them: ‘Have I always been afraid? Was fear transferred to me when I was in the womb … ? Mamma was always afraid. And me?’ Real and fictional examples of violent or dark relationships ...”

“... accommodation and clothes, gets a cheque for £20. The owner of the Best in Show winner, who may have spent far more, gets £200 and a replica trophy.Crufts has its own shops, which include My Life as a Dog, Dog Only Nose, The Little Dog Laughed. It has products and services that you won’t find anywhere else: post-castration or post-death semen ...”

“... of lawfare into the justice department. Compared to that, what’s a little bit of graft? He may be right that what was meant by corruption in the 19th century doesn’t worry people so much in the 21st, at least when compared to what else is going on. After all, it’s not as though Zuckerberg and Bezos need any more money, even if they seem slavishly ...”

“... The knights’ determination to defend a barren island they had never wanted to occupy may seem irrational, yet their actions were not only suicidally brave but perfectly sensible; a not unknown combination in human carry-on. Crazy, yes, but lucky? I don’t think so.They stayed on Malta for another two centuries, until Napoleon threw them out in ...”

“... is a ‘plank of wood with a hole in the middle’ and there’s no shower or bath. Her new home may seem inhospitable, but the narrator finds that focusing on the essentials banishes her ‘more trivial thoughts’. And then there’s the surrounding landscape, which ‘dips at the end of the field and vanishes into the sea, shedding everything, only to ...”

“... uselessness of his knowledge – the literary equivalent of a land acknowledgment. This fretting may come to be seen as an artefact of its time, as marginal as the medium delivering it. Small Rain is, among other things, a lament. The narrator sees signs of the rise of right-wing politics in the gun rack of the contractor renovating his house and in his ...”

“... officials celebrated Israel’s technological capabilities as proof of its military supremacy. In May 2023, Eyal Zamir, the director general of the Ministry of Defence, boasted that the country was on the verge of becoming an ‘AI superpower’.All the hype stifled a number of warnings from establishment figures, including Michael Milshtein, head of IDF ...”

“... for evil. Evil, James writes, is a concept invented to describe ‘elements of the universe which may make no rational whole in conjunction with the other elements’ and which ‘can only be considered so much irrelevance and accident – so much “dirt” as it were, and matter out of place’. At the sorting centre, I’d watched a large, ornate Bible ...”

“... to hear Smith’s request for rapid resolution of the immunity question. As a result, the case may not be heard till after the election. Trump again benefits here from the law’s generous provision of liberal rights of process.Although Trump complains about the political nature of the indictments, he has profited both from the politicisation of the ...”