“... to diminish their occurrence (the accounts always preach to the converted and incite the rest); we may be better placed now than ever before to wonder whether there’s any useful instruction to be had from such books. Whether, that is to say, they haven’t become the fiction of choice for contemporary armchair philosophers, telling us very little about ...”

“... it represents. Of the three, the map might appear to be the odd one out: the mirror and the photo may be two-dimensional illusions of a three-dimensional reality, and both are notoriously prone to distortion, but they operate by optical mechanisms that apparently guarantee a slavish fidelity to what can be seen. The map, in contrast, must ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sappho, Eloisa, Mrs Macaulay, the Empress of Russia, Mme d’Eon etc. These, and many more may be reckoned exceptions; and, are not all heroes as well as heroines, exceptional to general rules? I wish to see women neither heroines nor brutes, but reasonable creatures. The point was political, but its immediate target was the late 18th-century literary ...”

“... the verge of collapse. If it has any value at all, then it is only as a functional entity, which may not be localisable within a chromosome. But once genes are redefined in this way, it is meaningless to consider them independently from the metabolic processes that play a critical role in determining their function. Third, that the process of development by ...”

“... President? (That is, if it did elect him: we still don’t know what happened in Florida, and we may never really know.) Back then, even if you despised Reagan for his politics, you had to acknowledge his charisma, or at least that others felt its sway. It’s the same with Clinton today: even if you loathe him for his duplicity, you have to admit his ...”

“... writing the lives of psychoanalysts should be better at this than most. But there are those who may doubt the propriety of their revelations and investigations. Even when the subject is a fairly ordinary mortal they feel that he or she has a right to some posthumous privacy; and the psychoanalytical profession would presumably claim to be at least as ...”

“... themselves were historical beings? The burial practices of Homo neanderthalensis suggest that they may have done so, but even this species shows an unerring technological repetitiveness, making essentially the same types of stone tool year after year for millennia, with no more than minor variations on a limited number of technological themes. Indeed, many ...”

“... a religion, comparable to but distinct from its Abrahamic siblings, Western societies may feel confident in pressing Muslims to conform to mainstream values while allowing them spaces for public worship and private conscience consistent with national loyalties. If it is much more than a ‘religion’ – a whole, alternative way of being that is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as significant as evidence gets. But, like a string of previous convictions, it can mislead. It may have been made in fear or distress in order to put an end to an ordeal; it may have come from a compulsive confessor; it may have been made in the hope of securing bail or facing a ...”

“... So far, I may have given more expression of preference than solid argument. I need now to list the main details throughout the book which prepare the reader for Stephen to accept the Bloom Offer. There is at once a rather quaint obstacle. Most readers of Ulysses do not believe in omens, but Joyce eagerly did; in this he is genuinely like Homer ...”

“... his eight-year-old daughter. His first wife, assuming he had one and she was the same sort of age, may now be a millionaire, she may own a chain of shops or be a top civil servant or the wife of a duke: but her womb, according to Greer, will be the size of an almond and one thing she won’t have is an eight-year-old ...”