“... Panium, who went to Attila’s camp as an envoy from Byzantium. This accident of literary survival may, to some extent, skew our perception of the formation of Byzantine policy. But Luttwak is tapping into an exceptional curiosity about Attila among 21st-century readers. In the last few years, he has been the subject of major books in Italian (Giuseppe ...”

“... a lot of predictable wangles and fiddles, along with a very few cases of prima facie fraud, which may or may not stand the test of criminal prosecution. But it has used a brush so broad and coarse that, for every small iniquity it has uncovered, it has held up to public ridicule an MP who was evidently trying his or her ...”

“... This book attracted a lot of attention when it first appeared in the US in May because it apparently showed Israel offering to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa. That happened some time ago, but it is bound to be an embarrassment to present-day Israel, especially on the eve of high-level non-proliferation negotiations focusing on the Middle East ...”

“... the threshold places, the hidden rivers and eerie copses of the British landscape.5 At first it may feel rather chilly, but with time, it provokes an altogether more fearful, feral, intemperate dreaming.We know all the essential passport application stuff about Bush, and down the years she’s dutifully done the odd unrevealingly bland Q&A, but there’s an ...”

“... trading is only half the story; the removal of massive tranches of capital from the tax base may well be offset by the ability of black markets to pump liquidity into parts of the economy other transactions can’t reach. A widespread criticism of the US and UK governments’ quantitative easing programmes after the 2007-8 banking collapse was that the ...”

“... Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Ordinary people​ and political activists in these countries may have been more aware than journalists of what was happening. After the US invasion Iraqis in particular were often cynical about their new rulers. ‘The exiled Iraqis are the exact replica of those who currently govern us,’ an anonymous civil servant told ...”

“... mind that the Notebooks were, after all, no more than notes for future elaboration.) Be that as it may, it is in the context of the turbulent 1970s – ‘a time when there had recently been the largest mass strike in history in France, the overthrow of a government by workers in Britain, continuous outbreaks of revolt in Italy, the defeat of the United States ...”

“... As a result, any biography of Wells is bound to have a lot to say about sex. His sexual career may have started slowly enough, but once he got going he bonked for England – numerous long affairs supplemented by even more numerous casual liaisons. He liked intelligent women and was attentive to them, he flirted readily, he was fun, and latterly he had a ...”

“... as a continuing challenge. To be sure, those who dreamed of creating a genuine liberal democracy may have failed to achieve their immediate goals, but they issued a powerful invitation to establish the sovereignty of the people. This dynamic concept, Morgan writes, ‘has continually challenged the governing few to reform the facts of political and social ...”

“... that are ‘telling’, that fit into the author’s pattern, still being aware that readers may detect a different pattern, quite unintended. There must be a sort of chronological thread to this ‘life and times’ since he wants to present the story as being typical or ‘exemplary’, showing ‘the movement of a certain time in provincial England ...”

“... whose biography in a sense we are writing, and to whom we thus come as close as we can. The idea may sound fanciful, but it is pursued with remarkable force and fascination in Richard Holmes’s study. Richard Savage, the young Johnson’s alter ego, was a poor and talented writer whom Johnson had met in Grub Street. Each took a fancy to the other, and they ...”

“... Courtney; a prolific writer, she also produced a six-volume dictionary of female biography, and may have been the author of an Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women. Understandably, the compilers of the DNB in its early years had a particular predilection for biographers, but they did not read the signs of the times so well as to believe ...”

“... the editors of the three slim volumes that make up the collected Letters frankly tell us. Editors may be happy to leave it at that, but unfamilial biographers are less inclined to do so. Speculation is made to fill the blanks which Hallam Tennyson has created for posterity. Typically, the speculation shadows the spirit of the age. In 1904, influenced by Max ...”

“... For those of us who never quite mastered the old physics, the idea of tackling a new version may not be terribly tempting. But Ed Fredkin, the controversial scientist whose brain-child it is, insists that digital physics is simpler than the ordinary kind. In fact, its simplicity, its elegance is one of the main reasons why Fredkin believes in it. And ...”

“... get the fraudulent a long way, as is proved by true stories of con men and their patter; and that may be one reason why novels of expertise, where subject-matter determines genres, are suspect. Even so, some of the best things in the books noticed here are built within, and could not easily have been written outside, the conventions of ‘lower’ genres. The ...”