“... the younger Mrs Castle is a little less prolix: the five and a half years from October 1964 to May 1970 rate only about half a million words – an average daily stint of about two hundred and fifty words, though again there are days which take five or six times more than this to deal with. Was it all worth it? Though anxious not to give Mrs Castle the ...”

“... what rich uncounted loans, What heavy gold of tales untold you bury with my bones? A few tales may well remain untold, but the heavy gold (with a certain amount of ballast) is here in The Life of My Choice, a treasure galleon built to the same specifications as Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs. It is the record of a man magnificently and unabashedly out ...”

“... city, the Biennale, in 1895. Selvatico must have known his time was short: construction began in May 1894, only a month after the idea was announced at a meeting of artists and writers at Caffé Florian, starting with the demolition of the Tommaso Meduna riding school, which housed army horses and an elephant called Toni. The proposed site, the Giardini on ...”

“... have been whorled or studded with consummate finesse, they deflect our questions: ‘Their meaning may have been partly realised by their makers in the time and thought invested in their creation.’Alongside the acts of occupation went acts of orientation: that is the standard claim about the culture of the era – affirmed as much by that vertical band on ...”

“... old George’ of Poplar had come to personify grassroots Labour in much the same way as David Blunkett of the ‘socialist republic’ of South Yorkshire did in the late 1970s. Shepherd sees Lansbury’s evolution into a Cockney icon as a parable of the working-class boy made good by a conversion to socialism. But some of the photographs which ...”

“... there, in a sense.’ ‘Perhaps we should think about Scotland in the same way,’ the playwright David Greig said. ‘Perhaps Scotland has always been independent, but we were just unable to see it.’ Where is Scotland, anyway? That question isn’t about geography. Where does it exist most intensely? In football? In culture? In the past? In its music? The ...”

“... or fidelity. There is everything to be said for going out on a limb, but the risk is that we may think we are further out than we are, and sometimes the strangest place will not be the furthest out but the furthest in. This is the case with the extraordinary story by Kenji Miyazawa. It works wonderfully well in all three versions I can read (by ...”

“... of influence on the mathematical side. Queneau’s ‘Les Fondements de la littérature d’après David Hilbert’ treats Hilbert’s claim that instead of points, lines and planes you might just as easily say ‘tables, chairs and beermugs’ as an invitation to make a further move to ‘words, sentences and paragraphs’. Given that aspects of the Hilbert ...”

“... parts of the Pentateuch were not written by Moses and that some of the psalms were not composed by David … Paine took particular pleasure in some of the Bishop’s curious admissions. For example, The Age of Reason questioned whether God really commanded that all men and married women among the Midianites should be slaughtered and their maidens ...”

“... is ‘tanned and centred, his chakras agape, comprehensively Californian’. Philip Roth and David Foster Wallace come to mind as antecedents, though Tulathimutte has their wit without their warmth. He writes like a child holding a microscope over the ground, peering down at an insect burning to death. His characters prefer life online to life in the ...”

“... in nine years, falling from 2.2 births per woman in 1987 to 1.3 in 1996. A demographer somewhere may prove me wrong, but I believe this to be the fastest collapse in peacetime fertility in recorded history (less rapid, but still dramatic falls have been taking place in other states of the former Soviet Union). John Lloyd intends no irony in his title, but ...”

“... David Blunkett’s latest Criminal Justice Bill, this Government’s 12th piece of such legislation since coming to power in 1997, will go a long way to producing a caste of untouchables in this country: those accused of committing a crime. It will strip away safeguards that have taken centuries to accrue, and alienate criminal suspects further from society as a whole ...”

“... In mid-May, as the Sri Lankan army completed its rout of the Tamil Tigers, President Mahinda Rajapaksa described the scorched-earth campaign as ‘an unprecedented humanitarian operation’. Others were more inclined to see it as a calamity. Among them was the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had travelled to Sri Lanka with David Miliband to argue, in vain, for a truce ...”

“... 1977. In that year, two contributors to a Times Literary Supplement survey, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, spoke so highly of her work as to effect a change in this situation. Three more novels by Barbara Pym were published, this time by Macmillan, who finally added to them in 1982 – two years after the writer had herself died – the book originally ...”

“... the National Gallery in London. There are also new private collectors of Old Masters (Jeff Koons may be one of them). No mention is made of the changing market in ‘Modern’, which has in recent decades expanded to include a reappraisal of ‘Modern British’ – an area in which dealers, curators and collectors practise discrimination of a kind rarely ...”