“... help with Harry Potter.3 But both Ursula le Guin (in her great Earthsea trilogy, 1968-73) and Philip Pullman (in his trilogy, His Dark Materials, 1995-2000) developed evocative and consistent naming systems for their imagined worlds without going on and on about it. Of course Iorek Byrnison, one of the armoured bears in Pullman, is linguistically ...”

“... much she could have said to them, but she had met T.S. Eliot, too, and there was Priestley and Philip Larkin and even Ted Hughes, to whom she’d taken a bit of a shine but who remained nonplussed in her presence. And it was because she had at that time read so little of what they had written that she could not find anything to say and they, of course, had ...”

“... beyond the common markets in which post-modernism can flourish. Early in 1991, Tatyana Tolstaya drew attention to such a region in western Eurasia not far beyond Europe: ‘in the West the sense of history has weakened or completely vanished; the West does not live in history, it lives in civilisation (by which I mean the self-awareness of transnational ...”

“... the bin they’re about to clear. Bernard ends his letter with a look at the UN special rapporteur Philip Alston’s blistering report on poverty and human rights in the UK, and repeats Alston’s warning that Brexit will do nothing to remedy the plight of Britain’s poor. Jeremy Harding Germany‘Just left Frankfurt. Great meetings, great weather, really ...”

“... for credibility than a challenge to me by those who might disbelieve it’. In her notebook she drew columns recording her ‘timetable’, ‘progress’ and ‘wasted days’. She found that having ‘an impartial observer in Dr Cawley’ made her more enthusiastic ‘than usual’. Whether it was because of the doctor’s presence or because time had ...”

“... of Ladyton, or John Hutton, now Baron Hutton of Furness, or Bob Ainsworth, or the Conservatives’ Philip Hammond or Liam Fox – was prepared to answer. For those not directly affected, the acceptable form of exculpation and remembrance involves obliterating any consideration of dead Afghans and folding the British war dead into a single mass of noble ...”

“... team, led by the late Sir Michael Havers; the juniors were Michael Hill, Paul Purnell and Philip Havers (Sir Michael’s son). The three juniors at a later point signed a note listing, among others, Conlon’s alibi witnesses. They included Burke’s name on the list. However, a separate list later made available to the defence unaccountably omitted ...”

“... protect the staff concerned. In The Golden Thread: Stitching Patient Safety into the NHS (2023), Philip Berry, another hepatology consultant, describes the usual approach of clinical investigators as ‘supportive’ of the medical staff, ‘forward-looking’, ‘soft’. All of this was true of the SI report into Martha’s death, though occasionally the ...”

“... and also get, a hit of solid senior-common-room emollience.The lifelong strength that Berlin drew from his 1917 baptism was, however, often applied in less obvious ways. I was fascinated to learn, from Ignatieff, that his Latvian family had a direct kinship with the Schneerson clan who ran, and still run, the fanatical sect known as Lubavitch or ...”

“... slight Northern accent. He was one of a large family: Abe; then Bec, the one girl; then my father, Philip, called Phil but Phishel at home, from his Hebrew name, Feisal; then Jack, Harry, Sid, Dave and Louis. Their father was a tailor, one who earned too little, with all those mouths to feed, to be able to buy shoes for his children to wear to school. At 13 or ...”