“... that the Tolstoy is the ideal doesn’t help in deciding whether a Joanna Trollope surpasses a Philip K. Dick in literary merit. And so, Sen concludes, with justice: we don’t need a grasp of ideal justice to know how to act justly in the non-ideal world. Sen frames the prime contrast as between niti and nyaya, two Sanskrit terms for justice, which he ...”

“... and beautifully constructed young women’, but in the end it’s a straight-up contest between Martin Amis (‘He only had to stand there and he was in like Flynn’) and Ian Hamilton (who ‘never had to do anything to get a woman he wanted except fight off the ones he didn’t’), with the chronicler represented as sweating enviously yet chastely on the ...”

“... Delaware seems really to be a neat updating of the past, an amiable new cousin for Lew Archer and Philip Marlowe. Binyon is impressed by Chandler, although he thinks Marlowe is a ‘romanticised and to a certain extent sentimentalised’ version of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade; a little impatient with Macdonald, too cerebral and meaningful for his taste ...”

“... there must be an element of strangeness and exoticism in his work. You could call Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick Jewish writers, but they are also American writers. Singer never attempts to present a Gentile sensibility; in this whole volume there are hardly any Gentiles and only one with more than a walk-on part. The stories fall into three ...”

“... at the same time an investigation of Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘attunement’, the second of Martin Buber’s concept of ‘meeting’. About Bieber-Buber (‘alternative spellings of the same German surname’), Smith takes the singer’s objectifying fame as the most extreme instance of the difficulty we all must face in meeting the world. ‘All real ...”

“... life to understanding one particular, defunct figure. Cohabitation with the dead is not easy: Martin Gilbert has been living with Churchill for two decades; Dumas Malone has been communing with Jefferson for even longer. The demands of such single-minded scholarly devotion should not be underestimated. Bad biographies may be easy to write: good ones are ...”

“... again.’ Sandbrook’s touch is sure on those cultural areas which are clearly to his taste (from Philip Larkin via James Bond to Dad’s Army); his own affections lead him to spot nostalgia in places you wouldn’t immediately expect to find it. However, his tastes and affections contribute to a thesis which is in itself suspect, and whose generalities are ...”

“... the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip Gould’s focus groups and daily readings of the Sun and the Mail, Gordon Brown’s press secretary, Charlie Whelan, and his economic adviser, Ed Balls, sent the Times a fax hinting at a major policy change while Whelan tried to persuade the Sun to go with ...”

“... 1994, when the DNA from a piece of Anna’s intestine was compared with samples taken from Prince Philip and the Romanovs on the one hand, and with a blood sample from a relative of Franziska Schanzkowska on the other. The test proved emphatically that Anna was related to the Schanzkowskis and not to the Romanovs. This of course did not prevent her supporters ...”

“... American civil rights, for instance, both emerged from the Popular Front. Both Ho Chi Minh and Martin Luther King Jr could trace lines of influence back to interwar anti-fascism. Ho Chi Minh had visited the centres of the international left – working and reading in Paris, London, Harlem, Moscow and Canton. King had a more distant connection: among his ...”

“... chairs very reasonably in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less ...”

“... logo. Pulp Election borrowed the parodic form of Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective, and Martin Rowson’s hardboiled Waste Land comic-strip, but plagiarism was only one of its boasts. There was also the mirror-world voyeurism of Blackeyes. The Secret State, according to Keeldare, fed on perversion, an occulted sexuality. ‘She was wearing a long ...”

“... Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds then,’ Hardwick recalled, ‘skinny, smoking, and he was quite surprised that I had read everything.’ William ...”

“... possessive woman I have ever known’. She did not get what she wanted. Macmillan’s solicitor Philip Frere pointed out that divorce would be fatal for his political career and recommended a ‘west wing-east wing’ solution, traditional among the estranged upper classes who had houses large enough for the purpose. Until she died in 1966 – suddenly, of ...”

“... devotion to the Dominican Order, for example), but in 1540 he also made a copy of a portrait of Martin Luther. Maybe we should not make too much of this, since there is no evidence that he was personally ready to go over to Luther’s side. But it is possible that, before Luther’s word became dangerous, he embodied it in one of his works. It is worth ...”