“... married detective is a dull figure, as Ruth Rendell’s Wexford books tend to show, but it’s a major risk to destabilise a whodunnit with a romantic agenda. Not far into her sequence of Adamsberg books Vargas took the risk, with her detective – magnetic despite the scruffiness – having an affair with Camille Forestier, not a waitress/actress but that ...”

“... storeys up, a captain in a smart grey wool coat sat behind a big desk in a corner office watching John Travolta in Be Cool. At least he had turned up for work; much of the Libyan police force now exists only on paper. A colonel in the internal intelligence service told me that he, and every other high-ranking officer he knows, shows up once a week to pick up ...”

“... in the choices that make up Come Hither (1923), a volume edited by de La Mare that played a major role in the young Auden’s poetic education and was acclaimed by Elizabeth Bishop as ‘the best anthology I know of’. ‘I wish I were Mr Anon,’ de la Mare once remarked in a letter, ‘unknown, beloved, perennial, ubiquitous, in that very wide shady ...”

“... He proceeded to displace Charles. The authors now digress in order to consolidate one of the major themes of the book. Benton was the son and grandson of Congressmen from Missouri. Theodore Roosevelt had written his grandfather’s biography. In spite of the social differences, there were parallels between Benton’s upbringing and Pollock’s. In both ...”

“... inside the biographer like a spider’s thread; a critical study which exceeds in wordage all the major works of its subject put together ... ‘On n’arrête pas Voltaire,’ de Gaulle said of Sartre in 1968; and perhaps those down at Gallimard imagined they heard a pun. One does not arrest Voltaire ... and you can’t stop him either. Who started ...”

“... by Cape in 1980, and then by Penguin and Vintage, except with a new, enthusiastic introduction by John Banville and a useful short bibliography. Bowen is one of those rare writers who is equally good at novels and short stories; in fact, because her novels are short, densely written, formally deliberate, it’s not easy to particularise any difference between ...”

“... what you’re like and what you think that aren’t in your ‘script’.But the body has another major organ for conveying meaning and emotion – or, rather, it has two of them. Through the hand and its gestures, we can greet, promise, threaten, console, assent or reject, and much else besides. The hand can direct attention or outline a rough but reliable ...”

“... power, the ‘deep state’ and the dominance of the ‘primes’ – the five major aerospace and electronics contractors: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics – which he characterises as lumbering giants holding back the US military’s technological capabilities.This complaint is also central to Raj ...”

“... Militant, feminist groups, black groups, the UDM/Eric Hammond ‘realists’, CND, and, in all the major cities, a whole series of strongly differentiated local party factions. The fundamental mistake in Hilary Wainwright’s book is that she mistakes this fragmentation – a sort of slow dying – for a new birth. The two parties of her title are ...”

“... themselves, or to priests or nurses, while the heroic surgeon sawed on. Half a century ago, John Alfred Ryle, the founder of social medicine, declared that one of the mistakes of scientific medicine was to have shelved the problem of pain. With both clinical and humane ends in mind, he called for fresh study. Since then things have indeed improved, but ...”

“... and don’t on the whole seem to care, what is being kept from us. That is rather special; and a major factor, claims David Vincent in this path-breaking book, in our governance. It can have ludicrous effects. One was the refusal to acknowledge that we had any ‘secret services’: until recently, MI5 and MI6 had no official existence. Questions about them ...”

“... Humiliation if they confessed they had not read Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. As his translator John Hoole put it in 1763, ‘Of all Authors, so familiarly known by name to the generality of English readers as Tasso, perhaps there is none whose works have been so little read.’ Hoole did much to change that: his translation – staid, Drydenical, but ...”

“... and the nationalist politician, Shintaro Ishihara (the newly elected Governor of Tokyo), had a major success in Japan with their book The Japan that Can Say No, in which they urged a strengthening of the national ‘fibre’ and greater independence from the influences and pressures of the United States. A few years later this spawned China Can Say No, a ...”

“... isn’t all downhill, however. In the last 15 years considerable resources have been committed to major resignalling projects. Signals, which were once manually operated, are now controlled from integrated electronic centres using Automatic Route-Setting (ARS) and Solid State Interlocking (SSI). ARS sets the routes according to a pre-loaded timetable and SSI ...”

“... insanely short and lend insanely long. Many books have been written about the Darien Scheme. John Prebble’s The Darien Disaster of 1968 is still the best known. But The Price of Scotland surpasses them all on two grounds: first, Watt’s method and approach; second, his solidly convincing version of the story’s most contested aspect – the ...”