“... 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 ...”

“... in Andrew Lang’s Crimson Fairy Book. In the new ones, however accomplished and diverting they may be, the meaning is clear but coyly hidden, as in many modern fictions; although the examples sought out by Alison Lurie have as much cunning and high spirits in them as the old tales. In Ursula LeGuin’s ‘The Wife’s Tale’ (1982) it takes us a few pages ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Mile’s cosmopolitan culture: 35 per cent of its leading firms employed foreigners. The City may have been chauvinistic, but it was not exclusive or insular. It was the latest and perhaps the greatest manifestation of the national myth that Britain’s world supremacy stemmed from her enterprising, outward-looking, seafaring and tolerant character. No ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Hope (2000) preceded her next big one, Behindlings (2002); Clear (2004), a furious defence of David Blaine’s 44-day exhibition of hunger artistry at Tower Bridge, interrupted the composition of Darkmans (2007); and Burley Cross Postbox Theft was conceived and delivered during the writing of The Yips, out soon, which seems likely to continue the ...”

“... though in a grisly illustration of the importance of freedom of choice in America, prisoners may still opt for the chair.) With typical fridge brilliance, Kinney claims it’s precisely our ignorance of the historical role of hooding that prevents people from protesting against modern day executions: ‘It concentrates all accountability in the ...”

“... see, of our plans for the evening and the rest of the season. And of the impending publication of David Gower’s autobiography.* This had been ghosted by Martin Johnson, a man who, since he began following Leicestershire for the Leicester Mercury back in 1973, two years before Gower’s first-class career began there, had known him better than most. The ...”

“... over the man in the field. But to the blue-collar, semi-employed youths who yell for Rambo, may this moment not suggest the revenge on Sony, Nissan, Toyota and Mitsubishi? Today’s cold war with Asian capitalism excites scarcely less passion than did the hot one with Indo-Chinese Communism. Rambo as protectionist paradigm? The screen, a smaller one ...”

“... However, the strain of her inflexible attitude, with its insistence that her way is the only way, may well be telling. Sometimes the mind blots out reality and compensates by believing only what it wants to. Perhaps it was not just a wilful desire to misinform that led Mrs Thatcher to insist, in a confrontation with myself on Nationwide in ...”