“... fairytale. Often, Carter’s prose is brilliantly suggestive, at once playful and black: ‘May progressed slowly. The white lilacs in the churchyard where Honey said Ghislaine had been raped and hurt browned at the edges and reeked of halitosis and finally dropped down dead.’ This was Carter’s great gift – this stab of surrealism, this sharpness ...”

“... and other reptiles. Planting one’s flag on a root sheath of hair, significant though it may have been in the chronicles of biological discovery, does not rank in glamour with the exploits of Captain Scott and Sir Edmund Hillary. Hydrozoa are commonly known as jellyfish, and Huxley seems to have devoted a lot of time in the 1840s to examining the ...”

“... the fold through the baptismal ceremony, he was engaged on his master’s business much as, we may recall in Luke 2.49, this self-same master at age 12 found lagging behind at the temple in Jerusalem by his anxious parents, rebuked them saying ‘Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?’ and not, in the word of a later English ...”

“... for constructing such a complex urban environment. He was fortunate to find early masters, Robert Foote and then John Baird, and in all likelihood they introduced the aspiring architect to the ideas that were to transform his art and profession: historicism and comparative architectural history. In the years of Thomson’s apprenticeships in the ...”

“... and with the sharpest eye in the business for the tricks of the capitalists. The publication of Robert Gildea’s recent book, which successfully weaves the strands of scientific, cultural and economic developments into a political and military narrative, and of Gerald Newman’s unfamiliar case for the growth of an English nationalist culture from ...”

“... of, the Times on seven other pages. The Sunday Times features on six pages. The Times columnist Robert Harris gets two entries compared to Germaine Greer’s one, Gandhi’s one, or Mandela’s one. Noam Chomsky: nil. E.P Thompson: nil. The Times columnist Bernard Levin: two. Levin deserves a special mention. In the Times in ...”

“... Germany and the Americas; its characters a Croatian Catholic priest called Draganovic and Major Robert d’Aubuisson of Salvador. If British involvement and documentation seem minimal, this may simply be because that famous repository of guilty secrets, the Foreign Office, ‘deliberated for six months, then announced ...”

“... nine times more on repairing its town hall than it did on building up its coastal defences. This may have been criminal complacency, but Liverpool’s élite was manifestly not quaking in its shoes at the bogeyman of French-inspired insurrection. Wishful thinking is the occupational disease of all would-be revolutionaries; and one suspects that those ...”

“... been so sumptuously entertained by such a distinguished collection of bankrupts’. The bankers may have laughed, but Sampson thinks Lever meant it. If this is the case – and it may well be – it is a very serious state of affairs. Sampson, of course, wrote his book principally to do what he is so good at: putting ...”

“... himself with Christ’. Certainly he inclined to treat Popes as vicars of Michelangelo. It may well be his own account of his mission, given narrative form by the fantasy underlying it, that Vasari recorded as a mini-myth which is in essence a de-Christianised and non-blasphemous version of the myth of the incarnation. Dr Liebert remarks that, after ...”

“... experience, have learned something that you could bring to bear on a book about Rupert Murdoch, Robert Maxwell and the media in the contemporary world. From your unique insight into tabloid sex scandals, you must, for instance, have noticed among last year’s crop at least two that stood out for their quintessentially Post-Modern character. One was the ...”

“... a long and distinguished pedigree this analysis has. It is perhaps the most celebrated part of Robert Michels’s Political Parties (originally published in 1911) – ‘who says organisation says oligarchy’ – and self-recruiting oligarchies were, Michels believed, a tendency intrinsic to all modern democratic parties. Defeat from the Jaws of Victory ...”

“... people, is that one day, through the creation of free institutions with sovereign power, Europe may once again cover its true geographical, and even more important, historical dimensions.’ He wants nothing less than a restoration of the Holy Roman Empire, and, in the absence of any obvious candidate for the Imperial Throne, it is clear that in his mind ...”

“... effects by pitching his rhetoric high, he keeps his voice calm and controlled. His characters may indulge in their own strain of lyricism when they talk, but as a narrator Junger tends to avoid it: The Andrea Gail has a high bow that would force Billy [Billy Tyne, the captain] to oversteer simply to stay on course. One can imagine Billy standing at the ...”

“... mustn’t come about as the result of an accident, but must involve fate or providence, which may in turn require the presence of numinous powers. W.B. Yeats could see nothing tragic about a car crash. Pure contingency – falling drunkenly from a fifth-floor window, for example – lacks the grandeur of the tragic. The protagonist must be of high social ...”