“... at school in Kiev) and Platonov, until they were all swept away by Solzhenitsyn.I like to quote Joseph Brodsky’s lines from ‘Plato Elaborated’: ‘There would be a café in that city with a quite/decent blancmange, where, if I should ask why/we need the 20th century, when we already/have the 19th, my colleague would stare fixedly at his fork or his ...”

“... Because the man himself is so ungainly, it is easy to overlook Michael Moore’s voice. Where his body seems ungovernable and a source of embarrassment to him – he often can’t bear to watch himself on screen – his voice is confident, almost suave. There’s a moment in his least known movie, The Big One (1997), where he launches effortlessly into a gravelly imitation of Dylan singing ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ before reverting, with a chuckle, to his own spoken voice ...”

“... the best translations are often the plain prose trots by scholars like Simon Karlinsky and Michael Makin which sometimes achieve a rough vernacular rightness by being simply true. Kto ne prokis – okrys’sja! If you’re not rotten – turn rat! (Makin) Tsvetaeva has been as fortunate in her post-humous fate as she was wretchedly unlucky in ...”

“... and one or more official poets. Caravans often travelled in the coolness of the night and Joseph Pitts, an Englishman who accompanied his Muslim master as a slave, describes the lanterns on tall poles used to guide the travellers. The prosperity of Damascus at that time was crucially dependent on the safe departure and return of the hajj. Although ...”

“... Leiber, Bloch, Matheson and Jackson. ‘I could, for example, be an “important” writer like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a “brilliant” writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible GENE McCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers ...”

“... is an account of a strange and shocking encounter between Koestler and Jill Craigie, the wife of Michael Foot. One morning in 1952 Craigie had driven Koestler around Hampstead Heath on yet another of his house-hunting expeditions, which degenerated into a pub crawl, though Craigie drank only ginger beer. Afterwards Koestler bullied Craigie into making him an ...”

“... Howling’ Holub describes how in 1885 Pasteur saved his first patient, the nine-year-old Joseph Maister, with his new vaccine: Pasteur died of ictus ten years later. The janitor Meister fifty-five years later committed suicide when the Germans occupied his Pasteur Institute with all those poor dogs. Only the virus remained above it all. Those ...”

“... portrait of a lost world before civilisation. Like near contemporaries such as Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, his was a work of synthesis, densely sourced and annotated but sweepingly Romantic in style and scope. It reflected his own Orthodox Christian background, privileging descriptions of heavenward journeys and finding echoes of the shaman in the ...”

“... America by Mr Peter Jay, but politically the beginning of monetarism can be dated from Sir Keith Joseph’s Preston speech of 5 September 1974. The key sentence in that speech was: ‘it is the method that successive governments have used to reduce registered unemployment – namely expanding aggregate demand by deficit financing – which has created ...”

“... There are fascinating discussions on subject-matter and meaning – on how veneration for Saint Joseph was manifested in altarpieces, for example, and on when Greek texts were included in paintings. These connect with Ekserdjian’s exploration of Correggio’s provincial patrons, who often turn out to have been highly cosmopolitan in outlook. The emphasis ...”

“... of anti-Civil Rights protesters onto the plaza outside Boston’s City Hall. His picture shows Joseph Rakes, a white teenager, wielding Old Glory as a spear, lunging forward as if he were about to impale Theodore Landsmark, a well-dressed black attorney who’d had the misfortune to cross paths with the protesters. As Landsmark tries to dodge his ...”

“... had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. Dead or alive. ‘Vote Michael Moorcock’, it said. ‘King of the City’. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing narratives (confessing, denouncing, celebrating, plea-bargaining for its own sanity), was being punted by its publicists as ‘the ...”

“... The serene face of Michael Faraday radiates from all directions: first in disguised profile on a postage stamp, then more handsomely on the £20 note. Illuminating the dark warrens of the London Underground, he now advertises an exhibition at the Science Museum to commemorate the bicentenary of his birth. Visitors to this intimate and thoughtful display are reminded of how much the modern world owes to the gentle giant of experimental science, whose insights into electro-magnetism were eventually to find application in motors and machines which transformed human life even as they transformed electrical currents ...”

“... January, a pair of scientists at the California Institute of Technology, Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown, announced that they had discovered compelling evidence of an as-yet-unseen giant planet – Planet X – orbiting the Sun, seven times further out than Neptune.1 This isn’t the first time that astronomers have believed there may be nine planets ...”

“... Jesus’s family to France the evidence is about as strong or as weak as it is for the journey of Joseph of Arimathea to Glastonbury; the most that can be said for Jesus’s marriage is that it is never explicitly stated that he was not married; and it can be said of the view (a later addition to the hypothesis) that there was no crucifixion, not at least of ...”