“... modern blockbuster, is over six hundred and fifty pages long), a dimly observable possibility that may have to be confronted if things really get out of hand. Fortunately for yarn-lovers everywhere, they don’t. The war that Clancy has imagined is fought, from its beginning in a Soviet sneak attack across the Fulda Gap to its end in a settlement negotiated by ...”

“... that a single Higgs particle should be a bit smaller than an atom of gold. Incredible as it may sound, powerful microscopes can actually image individual atoms of gold. But unlike gold atoms, Higgs particles should be remarkably evanescent, with a lifetime of roughly a trillion-trillionth of a second: they simply won’t sit still long enough to be ...”

“... to dictate ‘situation reports’, the teletext having jammed ‘temporarily’, according to David in the ‘ops’ room. I thought, perhaps, that with all the bad news, it had simply shown some human feeling and committed suicide. St George’s Day was my 28th birthday. This meant that my salary increased by one increment on the Assistant Governor grade ...”

“... manifesto that came to be known as the Limehouse Declaration. When Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and I met together that morning, we were clear in our intention: in breaking the mould of contemporary politics, we would create a new radical centre, push the Labour Party into third place, change the electoral system and usher in an era of ...”

“... Modernism’s scene of emergence and triumph in America, “Frost” and “Pound” may turn out to be not so much names of authors who quarrelled over basic issues as they are signs of cultural forces in struggle, whose difference presented itself to Frost in 1913 as a choice between mass circulation and avant-garde little ...”

“... writer? Not me, at any rate. The Garden of Eden is studded with provincial delicacies Elizabeth David would be proud of (‘jamon serrano, a smoky, hard-cured ham from pigs that fed on acorns’) and dramatic narratives of eating and drinking that might please M.F.K. Fisher. The book is a sort of domestic novel, a portrait of amour fou and its aftermath in ...”

“... blanket statement about Penelope, that ‘no modern reader can find her emotionally plausible,’ may be based on notions of what a right-thinking liberated woman is supposed to feel. As she goes on to document, feminist rewritings and critical studies of Penelope have tried to fill in the gaps that Homer leaves in a character about whom we are supposed to ...”

“... smells and habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb.’ It may be that Macfarlane overestimates how far a linguistic effort can alter habits, which are driven by forces such as the market in computer games, the depersonalising of language which accompanied the new power of the civil service after the Civil War and the ...”

“... died war-related deaths (by killing, disease, or starvation) during these dreadful years. This may be a bit high (Sir William Petty put the number at between a quarter and a third), but Carlton plausibly argues that even in England a higher percentage of the population died in the civil wars than died in Flanders during the First World War. Carlton’s ...”

“... under the name of the Scythian Shepherd, or Tamberlain the Great, which how good it is, any one may Iudge by its obscurity, being a thing, not a Bookseller in London, or scarce the Players themselves, who Acted it formerly, cou’d call to Remembrance, so far, that I believe that whoever was the Author, he might e’en keep it to himself secure from ...”

“... preached a Jewish return to Zion. Chapter 1, ‘Could It Be Now?’, begins with the appearance of David the Reubenite in Venice some time around Hanukkah in 1523. Calling himself ‘son of Solomon and brother to King Joseph’, ruler of the lost tribes of Reuben, Gad and Manasseh that dwelt in the far east of myth, beyond the Sambatyon (‘a river so Jewish ...”

“... programme of the federal government; and a lot of them were listening to their radios in April, May, June and July. But there have also been grounds for fear that were genuine: a fact the prosperous neoliberal consensus lightly brushed off. Non-fanatical Americans of modest means have wondered how their children will pay for the emergency measures we are ...”

“... On 13 May Manchester City, the club I have supported since I was a boy in the 1970s, won the Premier League, their first championship since they won the old Football League in 1968. In those days, fans stood on old, groaning terraces; there were no sponsors’ logos to compete with the badge on the players’ shirts; and to my mind at least, the game had nothing to do with money ...”

“... From David Hockney’s Lord of Misrule to its repetition on the back of the jacket, this book is a bull shot, like the cocktail at the bar in Langan’s Brasserie. It consists of Langan’s self-portrait, written in the sleepless marches, to which the art critic Brian Sewell has contributed a memoir of friendship which will come as a pleasant surprise to readers more accustomed to his inspired Sowerberry in the columns of the Evening Standard ...”

“... the mood took him, an advocate of cool. In Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude, Dick Pountain and David Robins define cool as a ‘new secular virtue’ – the official language of a private or subcultural rebelliousness retuned from generation to generation, as well as of worldwide commodity fetishism. According to Alan Liu, in The Laws of Cool, it’s a ...”