“... globally – a big if – we will before long be able to trade carbon anywhere in the world. As John Lanchester noted in the last issue of the LRB, the science of global warming is not straightforward. The basic physics has been clear since the 19th century. What’s been harder to understand in detail are matters such as the many feedback loops by which a ...”

“... only to deepen the confusion. Witness Create, a glossy catalogue published to coincide with a major show of Outsider Art at the Berkeley Art Museum this spring. However beautifully put together, the book unsettles, not least by its thoroughly hip-bourgeois and neatly packaged aspect. It’s a sort of indie-trendy, iPhone-Android-Compatible, Meeting with ...”

“... Digest aphorisms, fake quotations from Lenin, and conspiracy theories spun by outfits like the John Birch Society. Well into the 1980s, he remained convinced that the Kremlin leadership was intent on turning the Caribbean into a ‘Red lake’. This evidence-free formulation was used to justify the administration’s secret and illegal arming of Contra ...”

“... with a naturalistic account of sex and sexual pleasure that there was in France. The radical John Wilkes’s venture into sexual literature is so marginal that it doesn’t figure here at all; the conflation of liberty and libertinage in Don Giovanni’s famous aria would have fallen on uncomprehending ears. We do not quite know, as Porter and Hall point ...”

“... to Tariq Ali. Before my dismissal, I appeared on television to defend the paper against A.J. Ayer, John Gross and Colin Welch – with a chairman who accused me of being a disciple of Sorel, a writer of whom I had barely heard. (David Caute sardonically notes that ‘the allusion to Sorel was standard nonsense among professors of history and politics hostile ...”

“... an actor explore a part and bring greater depth and resonance to it. Trimble and his deputy, John Taylor, are redefining Unionism, and the redefinition is there in the News Letter editorial’s ‘new-sprung modern light’, as Edmund Burke would put it. Something is flying off and out of the caked nest, and it’s not crying ‘yarr yarr yarr’. The ...”

“... by Irby, but also by Yates, Kerrigan, L.A. Murillo, Dudley Fitts, Julian Palley, Harriet de Onis, John Fein? There are also the volumes, notably The Aleph (1970) and Dr Brodie’s Report (1972), which Norman Thomas di Giovanni translated in collaboration with Borges. Well, which of these versions do you prefer? ‘I come from a vertiginous country where the ...”

“... which we firmly believe are in the best interests of everyone.’ Yet it can be seen from John Braithwaite’s absorbing study of Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry that Upjohn was at that very moment part of a producer’s cartel which, from 1953 to 1960, controlled the price of broad-spectrum antibiotics (particularly tetracycline). The ...”

“... of English culture, Wiener states that Dickens’s ‘fictional world led from the Old England of John Bull and stage-coaches through the feverish new urban and industrial society to end in a cathedral town among public school men’. This is preceded by a quotation from Angus Wilson on Drood which does not really help the discussion, for the point surely is ...”

“... memoir which prefaced Shead’s book are re-quarried. And Motion never cites references – a major irritation of this biography without bibliography. Constant’s life-story is told with gusto, nevertheless. The brilliant conversationalist and punster – a schoolboyish Wilde or down-to-earth Coleridge – is admirably evoked. We appreciate his pleasant ...”

“... or Tito (who had the nerve to talk back), it is diverting to come across individuals like Major Lukyanov of the Second Air Army, who ‘lavished infinite care’ on the construction of dummy airfields, or the dashing General Badanov, whose early success in the Donbas had later ‘quite gone to his head’. Erickson shows a nice touch, too, with the ...”

“... Islamic studies was confined to a relatively small number of specialists. There is undoubtedly, as John Esposito, editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia, states in his Preface, a need for an ‘easily accessible major reference work’ in which students, journalists and political analysts can find ‘readily available and ...”

“... to achieve his ultimate goal. All of this is illustrated by the contribution he made to the two major ‘initiatives’ since the abolition of the Stormont parliament in 1972: first, power-sharing with an Irish dimension in 1973-4, and secondly, the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. His interesting account of the first can be compared with those given by Brian ...”

“... Welsh publishing houses and record labels sprang up, along with Welsh bands, some achieving major national and international success. There was a renewed sense of cultural confidence, even when – or especially when – the bands were critical of traditional Welsh culture and middle-class Welsh-language activists. One musician on the scene told King ...”

“... in the 1890s at Friedrich Wilhelm Universität in Berlin, and his short story ‘The Coming of John’ features an episode in which the protagonist is intoxicated by a performance of Lohengrin. This rapturous feeling is only shattered when a white childhood friend arrives and asks him to vacate his seat – an experience that Du Bois compared to the Veil ...”