“... are narrated in the third person, others by one or another of the characters – a technique which may at first seem unnecessarily elaborate or insufficiently exploited, but in time comes to seem right, a gesture of respect for even small differences in perception. Miss Erdrich is as shrewd about complex long-term human bonds in The Beet Queen as she was in ...”

“... James Fox, who was contesting Westminster in the September General Election and whose mistress she may, or may not, at some point have been. Although she was there for only a short time, many were shocked by her boldness. At the Westminster by-election two years later, caused by Fox having become Foreign Secretary in the ...”

“... in book form in 1972, and Peter Carey’s ‘American Dreams’, a post-Vietnam satire, in 1974. David Foster’s first novel, The Pure Land, came out in 1975, and, deceptively to one side in the same year, stood Johnno, David Malouf’s first prose work. ‘It spread, throughout the Seventies and Eighties, this new ...”

“... Israeli expansionism comes from the Diaries of the late Moshe Sharret, Foreign Minister under David Ben-Gurion and Prime Minister in 1954 and 1955. The Diaries, eight volumes covering the years 1953 to 1957, detail a number of incidents, including the slaughter of 60 Jordanian villagers by Ariel Sharon’s notorious Unit 101, and the Gaza raid of 1955, in ...”

“... images of her body, an X-ray and CAT-scan images of her spine. Interviewed by Stephen Barber and David Clark, the editors of Regarding Sedgwick, she said that she was finding it hard to ‘take pleasure in writing’, and was much more drawn to the visual than the verbal, to texture rather than texts. In her introduction to Touching Feeling, a collection of ...”

“... a conscience can be uneasy bedfellows (though preferable to privilege without a conscience). They may give rise to dislocated feelings of guilt, which can lead to a perverse envy of the deprived – how lucky they are to be free of these feelings of guilt – or a conviction that privilege is, in fact, a form of deprivation, particularly deprivation of ...”

“... and according to the law of the Medes and the Persians, around the world, whichever country they may be in, ultimately they do all belong to the same partnership. I hope that’s clear.’ Well of course it was clear. The companies were completely separate from each other but were bound together. This formula has been at the centre of a long legal action as ...”

“... that of self-regard, which alerts us to the possibility that societies, no less than individuals, may be flattered by their own lofty sense of purpose when confronted by human misery. ‘The national consensus on American history as a history of progress,’ Sontag writes, ‘is a new setting for distressing photographs – one that focuses our attention on ...”

“... I am’. He nonetheless believed that ‘the artistic type relative to the systematising type may have a more vigorous innervation of the cortex, rather more volume in the arteries, a richer or more easily oxygenated blood supply.’ In short, much of our nature is determined by our plumbing. There is no one so deceived as the person who believes that he ...”

“... he replied, ‘God has given us a natural alarm clock.’ The Stoics occupy the last section of David Sedley’s enthralling book. For Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity is not about the book of Genesis, nor about early Christian debates over God’s creative activities, nor yet about the dispute between the pagan Platonist Proclus and the Christian ...”

“... or not it is fair to run out the batsman at the bowler’s end when he thinks the ball is dead. In David Horspool’s new study of sport in Britain, the great flashpoints and turning points mostly concern exclusions and discriminations, bans and bars, whether of race, gender or class, often showing human beings at their meanest and most paranoid. Stuffiness ...”

“... by setting about it with the enthusiasm of crusaders clearing the infidel from Jerusalem. David Herlihy of Harvard derided it as ‘a silly book, founded on faulty method and propounding a preposterous thesis’, while Lawrence Stone thought it advanced ‘an implausible hypothesis based on a far-fetched connection with one still uproven fact of ...”

“... most origin stories, this one is too telling to be entirely true; it has a frisson, as the critic David Sylvester put it, ‘at once Oedipal and necrophilic’. Although Magritte wasn’t present at the scene, he alludes to it in a few paintings. In The Musings of the Solitary Walker (1926), a man in a bowler hat, a recurrent avatar of the artist, stands by a ...”

“... party. If there is little that resembles a distinctly northern civil society (though this may be changing), neither is there much sign of an ‘official North’ as constructed by the state. What does exist is ‘no more than a caprice of the Whitehall mind’, its boundaries flowing around a series of ill-fated ministries and schemes. The North has ...”

“... at the moment is Beckett’s sanitisation of old age about which, knowing so little of Beckett, I may be hopelessly wrong. But Beckett’s old age is dry, musty, desiccated. Do Beckett’s characters even smell their fingers? Who pisses? How does the woman in Happy Days shit?21 February. When we went to see the Late Rembrandt show the other week I noticed ...”