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“... the 25 miles east to Boston or various distances north and south to the biotech firms along the ring roads and generally changed Hopkinton’s flavour from what you might call ‘Masshole townie’ to ‘East Coast Yuppie’. (Twelve years later, it was the town where Neil Entwistle murdered his wife and infant daughter.) Every summer my father, a truck ...”

“... as its veracity. Take that diamond of a title: one of the most astonishing episodes in the Christian tradition fused with a tentative Latinate gesture of a word, the promise of a great happening but not any time soon. Mythology’s most astonishing answer to a human wish is coupled to the sound of human wish at its humblest, most humdrum, least ...”

“... described as France’s long-delayed revenge for the Franco-Prussian War. The Boulez-Chéreau Ring has also been described, more preposterously, as ‘the Ring of the century’ – an accolade which plainly belongs to the 1951 Wieland Wagner production which inaugurated the ‘New Bayreuth’. Musically, the Boulez ...”

“... Angela​ Merkel had a bad start to 2019. The right-wing AfD was on the rise. The reaction of the German security services to the race riots in the East German town of Chemnitz had raised questions about right-wing infiltration of the state apparatus. And then came a request from the National Gallery in Berlin for the loan of two pictures that hung in Merkel’s chancellery office ...”

“... Adams’s model. A self-proclaimed ‘left conservative’ (Adams called himself a ‘conservative Christian anarchist’), Mailer also offers a version of American as sacred history, a battle between God and the devil, sexuality and technology (the dynamo, the virgin and the goddess of sex and reproduction in Adams’s version). The power of these forces is ...”

“... the intricate story it tells. In an Afterword, she recalls a visit to Reichenau, which will ring bells for anyone who has visited the great monastic centres there and elsewhere around Lake Constance. In this small, quiet, sunny spot in the foothills of the Alps all the sources of Carolingian culture, both literary and artistic, had been concentrated by ...”

“... which many Saudis are isolated. ‘New’ is a word which for Arabs has a suspicious, dangerous ring about it. I tried to explain what President Bush might have meant by the phrase, referring to the context in which it first appeared. The Cold War was over, Eastern Europe was free. The Americans obviously thought that these winds of change applied to the ...”

“... the benzene molecule in a dream of a snake eating its own tail (he woke up exclaiming: ‘It’s a ring!’). ‘The problem of course’ – McCarthy writes, ‘not Kekulé’s but ours – is that since the unconscious understands language perfectly well or it would not understand the problem in the first place, why doesn’t it simply answer Kekulé’s ...”

“... and shrugs. He says, ‘Well, today is the 17th,’ a reference to the day that the Italians, a Christian people if ever there was one, unaccountably plump for over the 13th as the blackest in their calendar. If this were a movie shot at Cinecittà, the critics would complain that the studio had been laying on the subtext with a paletta. Late trains, for ...”

“... In Diderot’s ‘Les Bijoux Indiscrets’, a man acquires a ring which has the power to make sexual organs speak. Michel Foucault says that he wants to make that ring speak for itself. (He sketched part of his project in this paper last summer: Vol. 3, No 9.) Sexuality ‘traces that line of foam which shows just how far speech may advance on the sands of silence ...”

“... and lost it in defeat. The most valuable object mentioned in Beowulf is the great torque, or neck ring, given to the hero by the Danish queen, which he seems to have passed on to his uncle Hygelac, king of the Geats. But the poet also notes its loss: it was stripped from the king after his defeat in battle by the Franks, when he ‘fell beneath his ...”

“... are ‘world-texts’ – a crucial term never wholly defined. Faust II, Moby-Dick, Wagner’s Ring, Ulysses, Latin American ‘magic realism’, diverse as they are, share a constellation of characteristic features. They are ‘internally discontinuous’; they may, accidentally as it were, achieve the status of a masterpiece, ‘but under no circumstance ...”

“... it’s easy to miss Constantine’s determination, in a cruel and rigid society, to hold the ring. Slaves could be flogged, but they couldn’t be tortured with branding irons or executed: only the state had that power. While more respectable women were to be protected from the violence of local strongmen, barmaids enjoyed no such protection: ‘For such ...”

“... me:Distinguished turncoat, ex-Manichee, ex this and that,Preacher of chastity with a son in tow,A Christian pistoned by new-found fervour,Born of the desert sand in occupied land,Born my exact coeval but not my coadjutor,Bishop in Hippo brandishing anathemas,Bristling with intelligence not my intelligence,Black-hearted but indefatigable –Augustine! You know ...”

“... DNA: they understand each other, because, at some basic level, they are the same people. The Bling Ring (as the Los Angeles Times called them) already possessed many of the items they were stealing, but what they craved was proximity and identification. Anyone can have a Marc Jacobs handbag if they can raise the money, but it isn’t just anyone who can have ...”