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“... construction’ work like cancerous cells: once seeded, they replicate out of hand. Consider Alan Sokal’s hoax. In May 1996, Sokal, a physicist at New York University, published a learned pastiche in a special issue of Social Text, a more or less literary journal. Believing that some fashionable intellectuals have abandoned rigour for glory and empty ...”

“... Nor did I expect to be reproved, however gently, for indiscretion by Simon Jenkins on the op-ed page of the Times – as if I hadn’t cleared what I proposed to print with anyone quoted directly who might have suffered in consequence, or would have dreamed of disclosing to LRB readers without Simon’s express permission what he had revealed at my dinner ...”

“... vast numbers of Gaelic words and phrases, many of them scarcely in common currency. On one page chosen at random I see ciseog ‘a pair of baskets across a donkey’s back’, ciste ‘a present of money’, ciumhais ‘an edge’, ciunas ‘quiet’, clabach ‘garrulous’ and clabar ‘mud’. Amazingly, the most common spelling of the ...”

“... expanded access to grimoires, it also stoked the zealotry of the anti-magic brigade. The title page of Peter Binsfeld, bishop of Trier’s Tractat von Bekanntnuss der Zauberer und Hexen (1592), a popular denunciation of witchcraft, bears a woodcut showing a group of witches: one kneels as she gropes the crotch of a devil, another dangles a baby’s head in ...”

“... However, it will hardly match The Royal Beasts in interest. The volume has a valuable seventy-page introduction and some useful notes by John Haffenden, who arranges the material as far as possible in chronological order. The play or melodrama, Three Stories, was written when the poet was 20, and performed, with him in the cast, by the Cambridge ADC. Long ...”

“... first few years and not just articles and reviews – he even wrote long epistles for the letters page. He was also writing for New Society and other publications. And then there were the notorious diaries he was keeping, a part of which was published as Marches Past: ‘notorious’ because Peter seemed to suggest he would get us all in the and with his ...”

“... it from traditional Toryism? And will it work? Mrs Thatcher is keen that we turn back the page to those inter-war figures, Ludwig von Mises and Friederich von Hayek, and see things through their lens. Ironically, in understanding Thatcherism the best place to start is with the collapse of German conservatism in the Thirties and the concomitant rise of ...”

“... But Lewis, amazingly, sustains his note of Proustian nostalgia right up to the end. On page 625, for instance, a casual reference to Jack Lemmon’s role in The Great Race triggers off a typical footnote: ‘Author’s note: In my younger years, in Monmouthshire, I would attend Fancy Dress Parties as Lemmon’s black-garbed Professor ...”

“... There may be an interesting group of examples of Newcombian situations (elegantly developed by Alan Gibbard and William Harper in another classic study), but it is not infectious. Most decision problems don’t catch even the germ of an inconsistency. For the logician, however, such monster-barring (to use a catchy phrase of the late Imre Lakatos) is not ...”

“... is this tenacity, if that’s the word, that also makes it easy for Spurs fans to forget that when Alan Sugar saved the club from bankruptcy, he surely had other scenarios in mind. Sugar’s Amstrad company manufactures the satellite dishes used by Sky subscribers and, as it turned out, Spurs’ pro-Sky vote was crucial in the Premier League deal. But we fans ...”

“... of expropriating the Church and the insatiable demands of total war. This confirms the findings of Alan Forrest in his recent book, The French Revolution and the Poor. Forrest’s contribution to the present collection of essays looks at the war from the viewpoint of those who would have preferred not to take part in it: a far cry from the patriotic bombast of ...”

“... the homes and houses of the Germans.’ Nigel Hamilton, in this robust last volume of his 2732-page trilogy, does not reproduce these orders, which surely have more than a touch of the touching about them. Here was a soldier who had commanded almost a million men in the field and taken the surrender of a million men (‘A million chaps! Good ...”

“... heart about it.’ Identities cross, compete, combine. Marni Nixon remembers: ‘It’s funny. Alan Jay Lerner said in his biography that I dubbed Gigi, which I didn’t. It was Betty Wand.’ Do you see how stars change places, a fair lady mise-en-abîme stretching from Betty Wand to Colette? This star intertextuality is something that readers and viewers ...”

“... o hyd.                                            Alan Llwyd This englyn, as so often, is dependent on particular Welsh assonances, but in at least some cases, and certainly in Dafydd ap Gwilym and the Mabinogi, the achievements are accessible in translation. Consider only this brief extract from the technique ...”

“... stranger in a nearby compartment and a threesome in a steambath. It’s dreamily soft-focus on the page, as if Houellebecq has lost belief in the entire project and is writing a little light porn to amuse himself. It just so happens that, besides being young, rich and sexually ravenous, and having ‘superb breasts, round and high, so swollen and firm that ...”