“... in Steedman’s case, perhaps, the moments of happiness before things began to go wrong. There may be, as she says, an element of psychoanalytic transference in all historical writing. But the story of one’s own childhood is peculiarly vulnerable to the slippage between history and ‘case-history’, in which fantasy and distortion are the raw ...”

“... had not gone far into his Homer before he hoped that somebody would hang him, and the same wish may well have filled Mr Raban’s bosom: the subject is so enormous and it has been considered time out of mind from so many points of view – physical, metaphysical, oceanographical, navigational, as a place for battle, swimming, fishing, drowning, shipwreck ...”

“... expects, seem uncontroversial, even if some of the consequences – for example, vegetarianism – may remain unappealing. Since McGinn invites objections, I will offer a couple, doubtless cannon fodder for the professional philosopher. One concerns some of the exemplary (counterfactual) fictions. Thus: if it were the case that human females got pregnant every ...”

“... take me long to work out that it was indeed that Muhammad Ali. The two men had met in Ghana in May 1964. Looking at the photo of Nkrumah on the page facing the dedication I could now make out the trace of something that had been signed on top of it. ‘Muhammad Ali/World Champ/1964’. The puzzle was how the book had ended up in the bookseller’s ...”

“... in England (in part because of the adversarial system) the pronouncements of expert witnesses may not always be accorded the same unquestioning faith, if only because there tend to be expert witnesses representing both sides. I wonder if in the French case there is a connection with the reasoning behind the leniency with which the courts used to (and to ...”

“... IDF. But they are free to call that arrangement a Palestinian state. As to Trump’s thinking, he may well have intended to repeal America’s commitment to a two-state solution, although his ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, has stated categorically that there was no such intention. When Trump said that he would be as happy with a one-state agreement as ...”

“... weary man-of-the-world at 17, nothing less thrilling than Clovis Sangrail would do. In our envy we may have wondered sometimes if it were not much easier to be funny with tigers than with collar-studs; if Saki’s careless cruelty, that strange boyish insensitiveness of his, did not give him an unfair start in the pursuit of laughter. It ...”

“... in Britain and America. (Blake’s ‘Tyger’, first known to have existed in October 1793, may have drawn inspiration from the tiger’s ‘eyes darting fire’.) In the following decades, the death of Munro was recounted dozens of times, in volumes of natural history and books of instruction or cautionary tales for children. In A Short Description of ...”

“... Etymology doesn’t help us much here. Ennui is French but it is related to annoy, and spree may come from Old Norse, or it may actually be French, an elision of esprit. The OED merely murmurs about the word’s ‘obscure origin’. Still, whatever their derivation, the words do seem to belong to quite different ...”

“... miners, dock workers, sports promoters and travelling showmen. Mary Collier, a washerwoman poet, may or may not have been a historical person, but the verse epistle published under her name is one of a series of 18th-century poems that describe working-class life and labour in a classicising form. Dic Aberdaron, an ...”

“... Biologists​  love abbreviations, but we often use them clumsily. What may sound like catchy acronyms to one group of researchers are tiresome jargon to colleagues in related fields. Fruit fly geneticists have taken whimsy to absurdity: MAD stands for ‘Mothers Against Decapentaplegic’. The ‘decapentaplegic’ bit comes from a mutant fly that doesn’t correctly form fifteen (deca-penta) important structures that go on to become legs, wings, antennae etc ...”

“... Africa is such that, by the time this review appears in print, the two books with which it deals may already belong to the past, both in their different ways witnesses to the haunted tensions, torture and bloodshed of the period of minority rule. The anthology of fiction, A Land Apart, was, say its editors, André Brink and J.M. Coetzee, ‘compiled amid the ...”

“... the man who creates to the pattern of his creation like the skin left behind by the snake? It may be that a partnership between art and sickness is a trademark of High Modernism, as Edmund Wilson argued in The Wound and the Bow. But if so, Lawrence wanted to be in a different business. Modernist sickness is more likely to be neurasthenia or hypochondria ...”

“... question is seen to be, not whether the new approaches are valid, but how much of the old may be seen to have survived their onslaught. With one significant exception, these books do not attempt to turn back the tide of recent historical scholarship, but express a mood in which the chief interest lies in discovering which parts of the old shoreline ...”

“... only footsteps from Communism. Sir Ralf, however, argues that the attempt to remove anything that may be disagreeable – such as relatively high rates of tax – to the status of a constitutionally untouchable subject is in itself illiberal. ‘Whatever is raised to that plane is thereby removed from the day-to-day struggles of normal politics, until in the ...”