“... predecessors, they can perform the tasks for which they are militarily adequate (whatever these may be) for desirable or undesirable ends. But unlike most of their predecessors’, their destructive character is so utterly appalling that the prospect of their being in fact used for desirable ends is certainly an extraordinarily unlikely eventuality and ...”

“... nothing in the night-time. But on the whole Holmes’s clues are objects, particularly those that may be detected through a magnifying-glass: Holmes’s glass is almost as famous as his deerstalker cap. Some of the clues, although solid, must be described as transparent too. There is often a largeness, as well as innocence, about these minutiae which ...”

“... that a professionalised academic discipline stands for.’ Quite so. The legacy of Rorty’s work may lie principally in the manner of its saying, in the display by a philosopher educated in the analytical tradition of the ambitions and the gentler tactics of the deconstructionists. Like Derrida, whom he admires, Rorty attacks established philosophy and its ...”

“... version of its structure, but the user’s manual doesn’t limit the ways in which the book may be read. Nothing said about Ulysses seems to spoil it. But Finnegans Wake lacks this imperturbability: it seems to demand to be read in one way, and nobody knows what the way is. Obstinate rather than patient, it holds out against every effort of good ...”

“... each kind of novel embodies a different habit of nomenclature. And where names are bestowed, they may also be artfully concealed or withheld. The greatest of all novels begins with a hero of disputed name in a small village of La Mancha which the author refuses to name. Lawrence Durrell’s Quinx or The Ripper’s Tale concludes a sequence consisting of ...”

“... on the artist. Why this should be is a teasing question. I am inclined to think that the answer may be banal, not to say dull. We learn most, perhaps, from those commentators who unveil concrete links and echoes in the utterances of the past. A formal analysis, however subtle, confirms what we have half-intuited anyway: but a thorough historical study ...”

“... way of knowing whether individual torturers seek an ‘uncontestable’ power in their work. Some may, others are conscripted peasant youths who receive pay and privileges for work in support of a regime they trust. Many people, though not all, will torture in response to the orders of authorities they habitually accept and even revere, as Stanley Milgram’s ...”

“... from St Teresa: ‘More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.’ What this may foretell – other than, perhaps, that couplings will end in comeuppances – we cannot readily judge, because what Capote has left us is only a sample, in three chapters, of a novel begun more than two decades ago, published in piecemeal extracts, and never ...”

“... are less reliable because they focus on the worst damage, giving the impression – which may or may not be true – that a whole district is in ruins. What YouTube can’t tell you is who is winning the war. The reality is that no one is. Over the last year a military stalemate has prevailed, with each side ...”

“... He had earlier conveyed similar messages: ‘Mubarak must go’ and ‘Gaddafi must go.’ Obama may have entertained the idea that he was playing a benign role in the Arab Spring – showing himself ‘on the right side of history’, as he likes to say. ‘Assad must go’ also sounded as if he was channelling the spirit of George W. Bush; but that ...”

“... can imagine the tale packaged as a Coen brothers movie or a podcast by the makers of S-Town. It may seem partly to be a story about race, but it doesn’t fall easily into any of the standard narratives: if anything, it goes out of its way to confound them. Its twisted moral structure inverts the usual courtroom sympathies, making the reader hope for a ...”

“... an expedient way of bashing opponents while pursuing some ulterior goal? Historical re-enactment may be fine for the Daily Mail and the grassroots, but it doesn’t seem a strong enough motivation to support a professional political career. We need to know not just what kind of past the Brexiteers imagine, but what kind of future they are after. One ...”

“... you must consider that all these things come straight from the Kimes family archive. And so may anything else. Somewhere in Las Vegas, there may actually be a car salesman who was once a ventriloquist. His dummy may really be called Joe McCarthy, and he ...”

“... Deveare Smith, and added to the reading lists of many courses in African-American literature. In May 2003, Gates donated the manuscript, now valued at $350,000 – he bought it for $8500 – to Yale University, from which he graduated in 1973. There was just one problem. Although experts authenticated the manuscript as having been written between 1853 and ...”

“... hold the audience’s interest better than most works one-third the size. The general reader may occasionally be bewildered by the mass of detail, yet cannot fail to enjoy a book whose publishers have priced it so firmly out of his reach. The high price is offset by some of the worst proof-reading and copy-editing with which the Clarendon Press has to ...”