“... would be an armed response to Isis). No wonder she’s begun attracting admiring glances from Robert Kagan, Max Boot and other neoconservative ideologues. Like them, she’s given to soaring abstractions about the inevitable spread of democracy but is also careful to point out that it’s sometimes necessary to use force in the service of global ...”

“... further back still, in the dark plans of Apollo, god of light, and the will of Zeus, ‘whoever he may be’, the god who killed and usurped his own father? The play’s riddling language hints at the way one word, phrase, action or body can turn into another, often at a terrible price. The death of Iphigenia becomes the death of Agamemnon. More broadly, in ...”

“... and other detachable body parts left dripping in gore around the house. A variety of situations may propel such fury. In Euripides’ Electra, Western civilisation’s mythic prototype for female-on-female mayhem, the rebel is an Outraged Daughter and the boss lady her Wicked Old Mother: Clytemnestra’s doom is sealed when she puts her sex life ahead of ...”

“... overlapped, as a glance at the careers of Ben Jonson or Fulke Greville or Samuel Daniel or Thomas May reminds us. Hayward’s book was a work to tempt a dramatist. Manning, its editor, who has no case to make about the connection between the book and the stage, nevertheless remarks on the ‘dramatic architecture’ of the book, on Hayward’s ‘inclination ...”

“... Notes for Joyce (1974, revised and republished in 1988 as Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman). It shows Joyce as both systematic in his approach to fact and at times struggling, and often failing, in his effort to avoid error. And it makes clear that Ulysses has a mundane source book – Thom’s Directory – to match The Odyssey, its ...”

“... his writing because his life was so full of confinement? His earliest surviving letter, written in May 1796 when he was 21, is addressed to an important friend and contains some surprising information: ‘Coleridge, I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through at Bristol, – my life has been somewhat diversified of late. The 6 weeks that finished ...”

“... expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell ...”

“... mind our journeys were filled with endings, along with the perhaps concluding notion that nature may be larger than memory. The hills of the Scottish Borders seemed to say so, as did the trees around Abergavenny and the stones of the Aran Islands.It was about seven in the morning when we set out. Karl opened his door in Chelsea and I stepped inside the house ...”

“... less sympathetically on his compulsive rituals, facial tics, and the strange noises he made, which may have been symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome. In later life, Johnson told a friend that he had never tried to make a good impression on anyone until after the age of thirty, ‘considering the matter as hopeless’. He disliked speaking about his background ...”

“... by the Brontës, Dickens and Thackeray and nearly everything that he could find associated with Robert Louis Stevenson. He also had a number of trophy items like Shakespeare’s First Folio (though copies of the Folio were not so hard to find: his contemporary Henry Folger collected 79). In 1912 the Wideners visited London, where Harry purchased a rare ...”

“... Island was his home. As a schoolboy of 16 in 1951 he was there with a visiting ornithologist, Robert Murphy, and Louis Mowbray, the director of the aquarium, when the extraordinary discovery was made of a surviving cahow on a tiny outcrop not far from Nonsuch Island, three centuries after it was thought to have become extinct. When he had completed his ...”

“... of, Hess was free on bail in West Germany, awaiting trial for espionage. His friend disappeared in May 1987. ‘In an isolated forest outside of Hanover,’ Stoll reports, ‘police found his charred bones next to a melted can of gasoline... No suicide note was found.’ In his own quiet way, Stoll becomes a hero. He is invited to give talks in Washington and ...”

“... of Colin and Caroline, holidaying in Venice, attracts the fascinated attention of the sadistic Robert, who has already nearly killed his wife during their sado-masochistic sexual sessions, and eventually succeeds in calmly murdering Colin. In The Innocent the engagement night of Leonard, the callow English hero, and his German lover Maria, is interrupted ...”

“... of Animal Farm have been published. That is probably not quite up to date. In a Soviet Union where Robert Conquest was fêted on a recent visit, and his The Great Terror and The Harvest of Sorrow are being serialised, there is not likely to be any flinching at Orwell. The Orwell industry, then, shows no sign of decline, in part because of his political ...”

“... destitution, or its schizoid sexual morality, or just the improving works of Samuel Smiles? We may never know, but there is more than a suspicion that the distinctly unpolymathic chemist/lawyer/housewife was just embroidering on a few simplistic items of Grantham family folklore. No matter that the nation relearns morality from such dubious sources. Other ...”