“... holds up once more ‘the convex glass’ of criticism in which the present age, like George IV, may see a reflection less than wholly ...”

“... licence plate: YE GEEKE).’ Like all good satirists, Coupland loves his targets. This passage may be a critique of the interdependence between personal style and corporate branding, but its cacophony of signs also says: enjoy! Yet always, until now, Coupland has held onto a distinction between his own writing and the texts consumed and produced by his ...”

“... with them as daily realities. The ‘liberation’ which shapes history as defined by the CCP may not have been recognisable to those who were being ...”

“... not specify the distinctive property of the particular grain, but merely states two accidents that may be either present or absent without affecting the subject. Oats would be none the less oats if no horse in England and no human being in Scotland were to eat them. Chapter 2, ‘The Construction of the Pigeon-Holes’, concerns the early days of the ...”

“... seems reserved, in the film, for her son. In 1962, what happened to Raymond Shaw and his men may have seemed fantastic, but perhaps no more so than the news that had emerged five years earlier that American POWs in Korea had made false confessions, and, shockingly, that some had decided against repatriation. As a 1957 New York Times story put it: ‘For ...”

“... and despite the Union leadership’s attempt to calm the atmosphere, the press made much of it. It may have struck the administration that it was beginning to look like the weaker partner in this careful rapprochement with Islam; in any case, by the summer, with public thinking about the veil taking another ungenerous turn, Chirac moved to set up the ...”

“... seriousness makes her book even more puzzling, especially as a novel written by a woman. It may be that The Tattooed Girl says less about America than it does about the stranglehold of certain conventions and cultural standards on American fiction. The characters are removed from reality, the book itself less a novel than a clumsy melange of ...”

“... twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased. Your disgust is evident; indeed, your large hand has, perhaps without your noticing, clenched into a fist. ‘Not fiction but news’: Hamid is unobtrusively, but constantly, addressing the ...”

“... which Groebner describes, the many Tartar women are characterised as ‘olive-coloured’, which may be an example of the practice that led to the mental habits of classification discussed by Loomba and Burton. Having explored the various categories of description used by Europeans over the centuries, Groebner turns to the documents and objects of ...”

“... towards the end of his book on Casaubon: The first period in the history of classical learning may be styled the Italian. The second period coincides with the French school. If we ask why Italy did not continue to be the centre of the humanist movement, the answer is that the intelligence was crushed by the reviviscence of ecclesiastical ideas. Learning is ...”

“... without overmuch comment, the view of Jackson’s friends that this was 50 per cent teasing. That may be more or less true without constituting a valid excuse. In his milieu, such things could be said only in a teasing way. What strikes one, on the contrary, is that Jackson had a pretty complete Fascist mindset, with the possible exception of ...”

“... fluffed up the hair along his shinbones.’ There is more at stake in this honeymoon period than may at first appear. Riley has a poetic way with a line (a Manchester sky is ‘dimmed white, like clean bone, or old wax, or Tupperware’, a description which puts you in mind of Plath’s ‘Daddy’), but there is something dangerously earnest about opening a ...”

“... of the situation than an uncontested framing of the present alone can provide. Indeed, there may be further positions of moral opposition to add to the ones we have already accepted, including an opposition to military and police violence saturating Palestinian lives in the region, taking away their rights to mourn, to know and express their outrage and ...”

“... with capitalism might reflect on the value of his radical reformism: the capitalist apocalypse may not be just around the ...”

“... fostered through the pretence of personal revelation, but through a description of affects that we may feel have never been articulated before. It wasn’t supposed to be a therapeutic exercise: ‘The point is to make an experiment out of thought, to loosen up the tight knot of what’s satisfying, even if it means risking being not understood.’ It should ...”