“... best we have’. He has called Emma Donoghue ‘one of the great literary ventriloquists’ and John Boyne ‘one of the great craftsmen in contemporary literature’. Gerard Donovan reminds him of ‘other great writers, not least Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka and … Bernhard Schlink’. McCann is the high priest of high praise, always handy with a ...”

“... put behind the governor’s party – 2016 should have been a shoo-in for a Mitt Romney or a John McCain, especially against such an unpopular candidate as Hillary Clinton. A second point: when Lyndon Johnson passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 he said with regret that the Democrats would lose the South for a ...”

“... was. Many contenders have tried to render Cavafy, but the edition Hockney came across must be John Mavrogordato’s, published by the Hogarth Press in 1951 (Rex Warner wrote the introduction). When Hockney’s prints were published a few years later, in 1967, Stephen Spender, a friend and early advocate, collaborated on a new translation with the ...”

“... with an unimpaired confidence in the traditional weapons and ammunition. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, produced under the auspices of the Royal Economic Society, is among the glories of modern publishing. Printed at the Cambridge University Press, these handsome volumes maintain aesthetic standards in book production which are in themselves a ...”

“... Sunrise promoter turned cybercriminal Tony Colston-Hayter, were straight-up capitalists.) When John Major launched his ‘Back to Basics’ campaign in 1993, ravers were an obvious target. A year later, his government passed the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which gave the police the power to shut down any nocturnal open-air gathering of more ...”

“... Experienced recipients of such letters must have learned to watch for that ‘but’ and to steel themselves accordingly. Especially later in his career, James found it difficult to separate the experience of reading other people’s work from the impulse to rewrite it. Not content with merely identifying weaknesses, he was forever taking up his pen to ...”

“... situation now is very different. At the age of 78, and with the possible exception of John Adams, Glass can be regarded as the most famous – certainly the most successful – of all the composers who emerged from the minimalist revolution of the 1960s. Perhaps because he shed the technical apparatus of such iconic pieces as Reich’s Drumming ...”

“... a sane, amusing, unintimidating introduction to the consequences of mathematical illiteracy, John Allen Paulos shows how a little arithmetic can cast light on the cohesiveness of cultures. He quotes an experiment in which the psychologist Stanley Milgrim gave each member of a randomly-selected group of people a document and a ‘target individual’ to ...”

“... You don’t hate us in Scotland, Master?’ said Professor John Stuart Blackie, the Teuto-Gaelic classicist, to Jowett of Balliol. ‘We never think of you at all,’ came the lapidary reply. Drafting a sketch for a BBC radio programme on devolution, I was rung by Professor Phil Williams, a colleague at Aberystwyth who is also Plaid Cymru’s spokesman on energy ...”

“... learns the useful art of skipping’. Skip, then, to the moment when the American publishing house John C. Winston Company, taking Maugham at his word, hired him to demonstrate this art. Under the series title ‘Great Novelists and Their Novels’, the books Maugham had chosen were issued in new editions ‘edited by W. Somerset Maugham’ in 1948. In an ...”

“... the reconstruction. Averof got his statue. The stadium, open to view, is still in use. Thin as a steel ruler, and too tight on the bends to be much in demand for contemporary athletics championships, the Panathenaic Stadium staged the finish of the 2004 Olympic marathon. The rightness of its placement, against pine-thatched hills, a theatrical public space ...”

“... big, lifting his claws to walk thrustingly forward and back – indigo, cyanine, beryl, grape, steel . . . (‘The Dream of the Unified Field’) This description keeps veering away from the eye into mental categories that attempt to dominate the eye, to bring meaningfulness to seeing. ‘What do I mean by true?’ I mean ‘something that can become ...”

“... two decades Japan piled up annual growth rates of 10 per cent and more and produced world-class steel, electronics and cars, financed entirely by domestic savings, without a penny of foreign capital – thereby flatly contradicting the current IMF dogma that global financial markets are the key to rapid growth. Forced to rely on energy imports, Japan had by ...”

“... Cook, scientific director of the Grapple test series; some recent disclosures on the part of John Ward, who was employed at the British nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston for six months during 1955; and a group of declassified US documents obtained by Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington. It may well be that there ...”

“... Popov, head of the Moscow Property Directorate, wrote in Izvestia that ‘multistorey buildings of steel and reflecting glass’ were the future for Moscow and that the city was ‘not a museum of antiquity, not a city of tourists, not a Venice or Pompei... not the graveyard of a past civilisation but the cradle of a new, growing, proletarian culture based on ...”