“... wear the veil do so in order to enter the public sphere on particular terms, though these terms may be difficult to discern. They remove the veil in private, in the company of intimates. Men veil themselves, too: the Berber-speaking Tuareg of West Africa, and resistance fighters in Mexico and Palestine, for example. Tuareg men are reported to veil even when ...”

“... of critique is closely bound up with the setting of limits, distinguishing what a form of inquiry may legitimately address from what is off-bounds to it. Rita Felski’s bold, stylish new study, however, is about critique in the less specialised sense of critical analysis. It is not a work about the limits of setting limits but a critical view of the idea of ...”

“... the truth so foul a lie.’ The ‘more perjured eye’ is also a more perjured ‘I’, and we may hear a faint announcement of Macbeth’s unintended verbal collusion with the witches. When he says he has never seen ‘so foul and fair a day’, he doesn’t yet know that ‘fair is foul and foul is fair.’ The sonnet is full of energy and wit in its ...”

“... but it’s all immaculate half-timbered houses and shivering lace curtains. I went there last May and when I arrived – it was a Saturday morning – there seemed not to be anyone outside. Somewhere the mayor’s son was getting married, and I’d been warned that no one would be available to talk to me during my visit. As I wandered past the window ...”

“... 2014 Immigration Act, which contained the flagship policies of the then home secretary, Theresa May. Foremost among them was the plan to create a ‘hostile environment’, with the aim of making it harder for illegal immigrants to work and live in the UK. By forcing landlords, employers, banks and NHS services to run immigration status checks, the policy ...”

“... can’t properly be counted, that the election system is corrupt, that whoever becomes president may be a thief. As its avatar and publicist, Trump is responsible for this disorder, and the fever is worse on the right, but only a few months ago liberals were pointing to the apparently routine removal and rearrangement of mailboxes as a sign of chicanery ...”

“... that good public life could only be made up of the actions of good individual men – which may explain why, in a quixotic gesture unique in the history of politics, he gave away one-fifth of his personal fortune to the nation in the financial crisis of 1919. The meaning and consequences of Baldwin’s vision may be ...”

“... around’ and ask why the state ‘condones life support’ for it, especially when prosecution may generate the glamour of martyrdom. It’s true that there has for many years been a web of statutes prescribing sentences up to life imprisonment for disclosing official secrets and for unauthorised possession of firearms and explosives. There is legislation ...”

“... in Lehman’s view, it seems probable ‘that the student with an authentic literary vocation may be the one who feels least at home with the academic orthodoxies of our day.’ According to an opposite scenario, theory owes its proliferation to large numbers of instructors and students who come to literature departments without much desire to read ...”

“... for and pities you.He bids you arm the long-haired Achaians for battlewith all speed, for now you may take the broad-streeted cityof the Trojans.This is a lie, because Zeus actually wants to punish the Achaians and doesn’t want Troy to fall, but since the dream comes from Zeus, Agamemnon reports it to his fellow leaders. The real Nestor is understandably ...”

“... his famous revision of ‘or’ to ‘and’ in the line ‘We must love one another or die,’ may suggest a quick answer at the outset: song hopes to be ‘happy’ and to possess the knowledge of life. But to come so quickly to so glib a conclusion would rob us of the pleasure of enquiring into the fabric of the poetry itself.Hard-bitten, aggressively ...”

“... rage – a ‘sacred French fury’ – against any invader from any quarter. On her feast day in May people were urged to walk the streets of ‘our towns and our villages’ – that charged little phrase – in ‘absolute silence’, not as a march or a cortège, but as families, groups of friends, individuals, ‘looking one another directly in the ...”

“... peace agreement was tabled. And it very nearly succeeded. Everything hinged on a few weeks this May, when the Darfur Peace Agreement was finalised and signed by the Sudan government and one of the rebel factions. Had the leader of the main part of the Sudan Liberation Movement also signed, the current crisis would not have happened. To understand why Darfur ...”

“... the gullible midget hero.’ This insistence on shining a new light on unlikely sexual relations may help explain why the original version of Freaks was heavily cut and edited and no longer exists; why the film, even in its edited state, was banned in Britain for thirty years; and why American audiences flocked to see it in some places ...”

“... of the dying Marcia in Barbara Pym’s own Quartet in Autumn). Those who are sceptical of this may prefer another kind of explanation, more sociological or even political. It would involve some comment on the adequacy or otherwise of publishers’ readers, and on the principles or otherwise of publishers themselves, and on the reality or otherwise of ...”