Jones is an undeniably marginal figure, British poetry’s very own Easter Island statue, combining cultic mystery with apparent obsolescence.

Some philosophers call the Chinese Room experiment a fallacy, akin to dismissing the theory of electromagnetism because you see no glow when you shake a fridge magnet. Others simplify Searle’s situation: would, say, a 3G network precisely simulating the neural activity of a brain in pain, feel pain?

Excavations carried out as part of the upgrading of the A1 between Dishforth and Leeming in North Yorkshire have found that rust on the nail in a Roman shoe appeared to bear the impressions of fibres, enough to convince archaeologists that the invaders sported sock-like garments…

For this book Naipaul travelled intermittently in Africa for six months with the aim of finding out what the people believed in, and the resulting picture of the continent’s spiritual identity certainly has elements that are controversial: child sacrifice, witchcraft, primitive magic and trickery.

These groups have driven ecological diversity by expansion and contraction of occupied ecospace, rather than by direct competition within existing ecospace and each group has used ecospace at a greater rate than their predecessors.

In arguing for the importance of architecture, Catholicism was making a point – half touching, half alarming – about the way we function. The decree implied that we suffer from an aggravated sensitivity to our environment, we will notice and be affected by everything that our eyes alight upon: the fountain, the casino, the flint wall, the iron balustrade – a vulnerability to which Protestantism preferred to remain blind or indifferent.

How do any of us, Lauterbach’s poems ask, begin again without turning our backs on catastrophic events, events that, like a bad dream, seem to continue to shape and define the present and our sense of a possible—or impossible—future? How does one respond to the world, then, in the aftermath of the aftermath?