“... paris’. Beneath these functional titles we are given the place and date of writing: ‘Berlin, May 1821; revised in July 1846’, ‘London, April to September 1822’. The effect is to make the reader constantly aware of the author’s presence; frequently, Chateaubriand offers chatty preambles, as if to help himself settle down to his task, perhaps ...”

“... from which he had risen to win recognition as an antiquarian. Marliani, whose smaller map of 1544 may have helped to inspire Bufalini, was a scholar of Greek rather than a craftsman. So he enlisted Giovanni Battista Palatino, a famous scribe who had published a manual of calligraphy in 1540, to letter his map. A hospitable and generous man, Marliani liked to ...”

“... him staring at ‘acting’ like a bull perplexed at being wounded by a matador.A key to Brando may be the way he carried us from an age of rapt belief in characters and their stories to fixing on acting itself. If you look at On the Waterfront now (65 years after it was made), some problems have surfaced: why does the Mob kill Charley instead of Terry? Are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Lawrence quotes one informant who, when queried on precisely this point, retorted that ‘there may be striving, not competing’: a distinction, Lawrence remarks, that ‘too few left intellectuals proved ready to hear’. His book is a lesson in ...”

“... a state of emergency, it went up to 176,000 a day. When George Floyd was killed at the end of May, sales went up again. Smith & Wesson had its best quarter of all time; gun store owners say they’re having trouble keeping ammunition in stock. The NRA isn’t wrong to take some of the credit: they successfully lobbied governors – and, when lobbying ...”

“... territory. You are about to become someone else’s problem. But not here. Phillips told me it may take three or even four times as long to get airside as it did elsewhere. There were numerous document, baggage and security checks, a final reminder of the almost perfect fusion of bureaucracy and paranoia that Turkmenistan had achieved. I was following a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... children. H.L. Mencken defined their mentality as ‘the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’. They held themselves and other puritans to severe account, an obsession they grew into a social vision. They were hard on sin and hard on the causes of sin; they urged magistrates and ministers to join forces, to wield the sword in the service of ...”

“... for example, returns from secondary school and builds a house next to her family home, so that she may live freely. She even has her own toilet installed next to her house – a symbol of modernity quietly condemned by Stefania. The spirit of amajyambere (‘progress’ in Kinyarwanda) is captured in all its ambiguity by a woman called Nyirabazungu, also ...”

“... that many people proved willing to support the campaign of mass killing and expulsion. Attitudes may well have changed, but it would be rash to assume that this is a long-term shift.In March last year, as the generals gathered in Naypyidaw for Armed Forces Day, Min Aung Hlaing spoke of his intention to ‘annihilate’ the resistance. According to most ...”

“... notoriously risky to summon a demon: they are dangerous, they might not do what you want and you may not be able to get rid of them. Similarly, if inventions such as Cthulhu or R’yleh are brought into a story – powerful cults, saturated with negativity – they might not behave themselves. As Claude Lévi-Strauss understood, every version 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 ...”