“... called Gone to Ground, concerns the narrator’s father, who went on a fishing trip to the north of Sweden and was nearly eaten by a professor troll, whom he observed through a keyhole eating his own wife. The Troll was eating a lady. Poor girl, she was tightly clutched to its breast by those rudimentary arms, with her head on a level with its ...”

“... offing. On the other hand, if the next leader of the party is to be – as now seems the case – John Smith, that would set the seal on the dominance of Scots in the Labour leadership. Smith is generally seen as a pragmatist, a punishing debater and a quick learner: less obviously, he is a man whose political instincts suggest a sense of Scotland as having ...”

“... found for the whole text of A Furnace. By the time he wrote this in the Eighties, Fisher had moved north of Birmingham to the hills of Staffordshire. Being at a physical remove from the mass of urban data seems to have helped him confront, once more, the city where he grew up. But the burden of place was also eased by the collapse of West Midlands ...”

“... notion of a filmic écriture – which is evidence more of how Film Studies are going in North America than of how the cinema has affected writing in France since 1900. The other art which is sold short is architecture, which has a stronger presence in this History as a metaphor, in Renaissance chapters on the ‘textual architecture’ of Rabelais ...”

“... One is the Barnes and Noble octopus, with 25,000 employees, franchised outlets in every mall in North America and a $3 billion annual turnover. The other, Amazon.com (‘Amazon-dot-com’), is a bookless high-tech office in Seattle, with a mere five hundred employees, and yet to make a cent’s profit for its shareholders. They can both call themselves ...”

“... and the same subject at the new University of Neasden (formerly the Polytechnic of North-North-West London) pronounced ‘excellent’. This could conceivably arise from strict interpretation of the ‘value-added’ criterion. Both institutions award a majority of second-class degrees. But Oxbridge accepts ...”

“... In May 1983 he was promoted to assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, and over the next couple of years he oversaw a secret team – operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff – which quietly conducted at least 35 covert operations against drug trafficking, terrorism and, most ...”

“... be said that the volumes under review offer much aid to understanding what was happening inside John Lennon’s mind. Of those people who should not attempt to write biographies of Lennon, Ray Coleman heads the list. A trade editor who might as well have been writing about agricultural machinery as music, he embodies everything Lennon had to fight: social ...”

“... years of the Cold War. This curious fact is noted in David Monaghan’s monograph The Novels of John le Carré (1985). Smiley married his wife Ann towards the end of the World War Two. He was evidently then well into his thirties. In 1960, in A Murder of Quality, he was described as ‘the very prototype of an unsuccessful middle-aged bachelor in a ...”

“... led a squad of masked policemen to the home of Owen McMahon, a prominent Catholic publican in North Belfast. They broke down the front door using a sledgehammer, entered, roused the family from their beds, gathered the male members, including an 11-year-old boy, in the front parlour, allowed a few minutes for prayer, and then began shooting: there were ...”

“... In July​ 2007 I drove west from New Haven for eight hours to Getzville, north of Buffalo, to meet Magda Cordell. She was then in her eighties; I wanted to ask her about life as an artist in London in the 1950s. Born in Hungary, Cordell had arrived in Britain after the war with her husband, the composer Frank Cordell, and soon became part of the London scene ...”

“... Last month​ , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of Commons while Paisley Junior sat at his computer in Ballymena ...”

“... II of Scotland a prisoner in the Tower, to be joined ten years later, after Poitiers, by King John II of France. Some might argue – and professional historians no doubt prefer multi-factored answers – that the tide turned even earlier, in 1332, at the now forgotten Battle of Dupplin Moor, where an unofficial army of dissident Scots and dispossessed ...”

“... bloom. On the other hand, for me Eros lies quiet at no season. Nay rather, like a Thracian north wind ablaze with lightning, rushing from Aphrodite accompanied by parching madnesses, black, unastonishable, powerfully, right up from the bottom of my feet [it] shakes my whole breathing being. [fr. 286 as ‘Woman’s Constancy’ by ...”

“... seal-fur sporran, had I been able (aged nine) to find out from such a book as this latest work of John Prebble’s that all these tartans were nothing but hype: a stunt devised chiefly by Scott to make George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in August 1822 as splendiferous as possible. In his anonymous shilling pamphlet ‘HINTS addressed to the INHABITANTS OF ...”