“... replies: ‘We’ve seen much worse than you. We’re ready for anything.’ The children may not even remember the days at sea without water, when the family escaped three years after the war ended, crowded onto a fishing trawler with sixty strangers.There is artistry in The Refugees, but it doesn’t manifest itself in literary ...”

“... that a good man, through no fault of his own, but by way of received wisdom and immemorial faith, may have lived an important part of/his life warped in error and foolishness’. Luckily the sonar readings and the traditional method – heading straight out from the bottom of Kerrigan’s land, bringing the spire of the Protestant church in the north out with ...”

“... no boost at all.Serner advises us to keep a pocket mirror always on hand, not for any insight it may offer about our interiority, but so that we might anticipate how others will perceive us. He looks ahead to Sartre in his insistence that we come to exist only in social terms, in the eyes of others. Self-knowledge develops not inside-out but under the gaze ...”

“... develop schizophrenia, but they account for only a small proportion of overall cases. This may be because ‘schizophrenia’ isn’t actually a single disease, but many different disorders that have been looped together; or because, as the epidemiologist John McGrath has argued, it’s better thought of as a symptom of something else: ‘Clinicians ...”

“... and one of Freud’s original inner circle. He has a hunch that supernormal phenomena may come from within rather than from without. Fodor had investigated the case of ‘Gef, the talking mongoose’, one of the most famous stories of the day, a poltergeist that plagued the lives of the Irving family in a remote farmhouse on the Isle of Man.* Gef ...”

“... a watery death. This seems like a statement as much about the man as about his artfulness. So, we may think, is the claim that Dickens’s novels, hampered by Victorian propriety, ‘cannot face up to the truth of sexual desire’. To be sure, there is an identifiable trick or ploy in the offing. Dickens, like other Victorian novelists, made a vice out of a ...”

“... of operatic heroines, loudly sacrificing all for love or liberty, had scarcely begun. But Boswell may have hoped for a more dramatic Amazon, one driven by passion to rescue her prince. This small, calm woman didn’t fit that fantasy. But, as he found over the next few days, ‘mighty soft’ was a false impression too. She was witty and tough. She teased Dr ...”

“... blows his mind; he wants to write the way Rodin sculpts. But the rest he can take or leave. In May 1902, he visits the Louvre and is unimpressed by David and Velázquez. He mistakes Chardin’s eggs for onions. ‘Nothing here means anything to me.’ As he leaves the museum he sees a blackbird, poised against a wall of green, which eclipses all the ...”

“... the streets today are the daughters of those activists. The demonstrations unfolding across Iran may not have a leader, but they do have a provenance.A month and a half into the protests, the Islamic Republic’s most senior figures are in disarray. Setting the official tone on 3 October, the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, mentioned Mahsa Amini’s death as ...”

“... so, he opposed a plan to admit women as fellows to one of Yale’s colleges. ‘Tory’, however, may be an exaggeration. He did nothing to hide his distaste for the administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, and – more in keeping with his earlier sentiments – lent his name to public statements protesting against the Vietnam War, and ...”

“... he’s describing, and, to readers unfamiliar with Labour’s doctrinal struggles in the 1980s, it may not even be particularly clear what the shift was. Smith’s references are also left unexplained (Eric Hobsbawm’s 1978 essay ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’ and Kinnock’s 1987 Labour Party Conference speech, during which he asked: ‘What do ...”

“... saying they valued those very queries.’ While McChrystal’s macho style and stupid questions may have had a certain appeal, it’s possible that he was valued more for his military connections. It’s hard not to be reminded of the fraudulent blood-testing corporation Theranos, whose board included Sam Nunn, a former head of the US Senate’s Armed ...”

“... Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor’ – is loftier than he deserves. This may be classified as a political biography, but it reads more like an autopsy report from the wax museum. All that’s left to do is to mop up the ...”

“... and scholarship’ preclude the substance of older works; ‘the approach of some older works may seem unfashionable, but the content is frequently more detailed.’ Both of us, I think, work at a critical but respectful distance from the radical nationalist interpretation of Australian history. Our subtitles echo our inheritance. Her romantic catchphrase ...”