“... of opiate painkillers is perhaps the most ridiculous of them all. In 1989, a doctor named David Haddox developed a theory about opiates he called ‘pseudoaddiction’. The theory, which according to McGreal was based on the observation of a single cancer patient, said that if a patient was showing signs of tolerance and craving larger doses of an ...”

“... quickly, and aloud.’ (The faux-solicitous note recalls one of his best jokes, in a review of David Lodge’s Working with Structuralism: ‘His title,’ Carey said, ‘has a making-the-best-of-it ring, rather like “Surviving with Sciatica”.’) Based on this account, there is not much doubt where his own preference in the 20th century lies and it is ...”

“... intellectual and emotional energy, when he left Ireland and pursued a career in England. As David Bromwich has already pointed out, there is an English Burke whom O’Brien never makes known to his readers. He understands, and can excitingly depict, the oratory and politics of Burke’s House of Commons; but since he is intent on arguing that the ghosts ...”

“... the operation that remained, there was almost no first-hand reporting. One freelance journalist, David Divine, made three trips in a small boat that was rescuing British troops, and the Royal Navy took a Pathé newsreel reporter-cum-cameraman; otherwise the BBC (and British newspapers) relied on the Ministry of Information. The consequences were a mixture of ...”

“... College Hospital was dead and all medical records destroyed: but I very foolishly forgot that the young houseman does the day-to-day work, and he wrote to me from his retirement with important new evidence. Apparently Orwell didn’t stand a chance: but they did not tell him, or Sonia. The nature of George Orwell’s own writings raises three particular ...”

“... tactic was successful with several Democratic luminaries on the committee staff – among them the young Hillary Rodham – and as a result Nixon was able to leave power with the moral equivalent of a plea-bargain. One consequence of that period of moral and political leniency, misrepresented by self-pitying Nixonites as a lynching, was that Nixon’s estate ...”

“... Brideshead has been built up is really adequate to the issues at stake. Conservative writers like David Watkin, Roger Scruton and, to a lesser extent recently, Gavin Stamp have worked with impressive zeal to see that every wretched tower block in the land is listed as a national monument to the reforming ambitions of 1945. They have also presented themselves ...”

“... year of two Russian colleagues at different ends of the journalistic ladder – Dmitry Kholodov, a young reporter on Moskovsky Komsomolets, killed by a briefcase bomb while investigating corruption in the military; and Vladislav Listyev, killed after he announced that notoriously corrupt advertising practices would be suspended at the main state TV channel ...”

“... and the titillating, although Knowlson’s sureness of touch deserts him on the topic of the young Beckett and prostitutes, his prose veering wildly between the disingenuously coy and the frankly sexist. Above all, there is the novelty value of the unpublished diaries Beckett kept during his stay in Germany in 1936-7. We get a sense of Beckett ...”

“... birthday letter to Lay: ‘55 years old. Wow! That is really old. Thank goodness you have such a young, beautiful wife.’ Political links outside the US were also important, particularly in India, where Enron’s massively expensive Dabhol electricity generating plant, the first such privately owned project in the Subcontinent, was mired in controversy, and ...”

“... allowed him to follow them all through.His friends and scientific colleagues John Herschel and David Brewster pressed Talbot to focus for long enough to publish his findings. ‘I have often wondered,’ Herschel wrote to him in 1833, ‘that being, as I am aware you are, in possession of a number of curious & interesting things in optical science and ...”

“... like the pockets of comic relief in Shakespearean tragedy. It is far larger and more defining. In David Hawkes’s translation of The Dream, an achievement surpassing Scott Moncrieff’s or later English versions of Proust in the art of delivering one cultural world – a much stranger one – into another, not only is the wit no barrier to an Anglophone ...”

“... had come about, not through vile Occidental cunning, but by chance. When the Governor, Sir Mark Young, emerged from a Japanese prison camp in 1945, he brought out a plan to empower Hong Kong to run some of its own affairs, on a basis of one ratepayer (literate in English or Chinese), one vote, as part of the leisurely run-up to self-rule that was normal in ...”

“... the digital-oriented sense) that it’s not easy to see where the accumulated labour in them is. David Harvey’s lectures on Capital, for instance, the best beginning for anyone studying Marx’s most important book, are of immense value but they’re also available for free on the internet, so if you buy them as a book – you can take in information much ...”

“... Ironically, we can read Obeyesekere as the ethnographer of a fragment of an English village: the young males, out to sea for years, a society about which Sahlins is discreetly silent. Or almost. He has 17 appendices rebutting particular bits of Obeyesekere’s version. One is entitled ‘On the Wrath of Captain Cook’. This is, as throughout Sahlins’s ...”