“... difference. ‘Maam can borrow up to six books.’ ‘Six? Heavens!’ Meanwhile the ginger-haired young man had made his choice and given his book to the librarian to stamp. Still playing for time the Queen picked it up. ‘What have you chosen, Mr Seakins?’ expecting it to be, well, she wasn’t sure what she expected, but it wasn’t what it ...”

“... time she had seen her mother, she insisted that Ida wear a comb to make her look more ‘like a young woman’. On the Auschwitz ramp, she speculates, it made her look old enough for a work-detail. There are a few more such testimonies. But the Shoah is by and large represented here neither in first-person accounts of the camps nor in pictures of its worst ...”

“... of Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped was really our favourite, but we couldn’t call our daughter David, or name her after Alan Breck. She’d have to be named for the sequel.Like all my contemporaries, in those first years when the contraceptive pill was widely available, I only half believed I could coerce my body, and suspected that it might have some ...”

“... had already retired from the ministry when he began the vast task of translating Kierkegaard, and David Swenson died in the middle of translating the great Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which was, however, completed by Lowrie, and first appeared in 1941. But in 1941, there were other, more pressing things to think about, and it was not until Sartre and ...”

“... the Socialist Party of America under Norman Thomas and perhaps, at university, an admirer of the young militants whose star rose in the party during the early 1930s. Lois sends a funny letter to her family in December 1936, responding to ‘Mother’s crack that she was sorry I was a Trotskyist’: ‘Lady, I ain’t no Trotskyist. You should read up on the ...”

“... in dinner jackets. Francesca is set in the Sixties and Colin Ferguson must be a contemporary of young Roger Scruton. It is tempting to turn the novel on its author as his testament on the necessity of lordolatrous conservatism. But Scruton is not that easily nailed. Francesca is written in an edgy enigmatic style, which borders on, but never quite ...”

“... at least during the period from 1953 to 1971 when he was out of office. Douglas Brinkley, the able young historian who has chronicled Acheson’s final years, can be quite sharp towards him, despite his genuine admiration for the man who more than most was responsible for that combination of policies which led the Western world to safety in the early years of ...”

“... may be thought to have gone out of him once it became obvious that he was not going to die young. Wells’s most famous imaginative device, the time machine, is relevant to this, since the Time Traveller is in effect cheating death by voyaging forward in another dimension. Did Wells himself make some such jump into hyperdrive, becoming a prophet of the ...”

“... of the world and the cradle of a new race of men’. In the end, Wokulski gives a fortune to a young Polish scientific dreamer, whose more rational proposal is to invent a flying machine. Szuman explains Wokulski’s contradictions by saying that he is really two men, ‘a Romantic of the pre-1863 kind, and a positivist of the ’70s’, but this is too ...”

“... away from the eyes of the international community. The ‘autonomy’ envisaged by the Camp David agreements is unlikely to extend beyond garbage collection. Ostensibly Two Minutes over Baghdad is a True Life Adventure Story in the ‘Entebbe’ tradition, in which an author trades his skills as a publicist against ‘inside’ information supplied by ...”

“... called them, antagonised every influential social group: the military, writers and artists, young people, industrial workers, the bureaucrats in the ministries, the Party apparatus – and finally, his own colleagues in the Presidium. So ended a period of greater hope and change than the Soviet Union had known since the 1920s. When Khrushchev was ...”

“... of liberal individualism. Bradbury remains where he started: a niggling rather than an angry young man. So he describes himself in the introduction to a pair of essays written twenty years ago and now reissued.* Maggie Ross is the author of The Gasteropod, a novel which won some fame in the Sixties. Her second novel is engaging but disappoints the ...”

“... panic among the monks. How did it come about? What are they to do with the child? The pretty young novice who makes eyes at him – could he be the responsible party? But where could he have found out how? Rachel Ingalls rollicks us over a barrel of theological conundrums immaculately conceived. It is the kind of material one would be overjoyed to relate ...”

“... Elton leafing through A la Carte as a substitute for actual cooking, and Emma consulting Elizabeth David for instruction in the matter of marrow-bones. Wherever the daily human comedy of manners is deployed as a cloak for our brute, indispensable appetites and satisfactions, food and drink must be present or, if absent, must expect to have their absence ...”

“... from memory before meeting the agent. He did all this without ever arousing the suspicion of the young English theoretician with whom he shared an office for two years, nor that of any of his other colleagues. Back in England, he was appointed head of the theoretical division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, in which capacity he told ...”