“... master is a satire on this faith (as well as on the master’s unexamined belief that we are all masters of our actions). Diderot seems to have been provoked into writing Jacques le fataliste by his reading of Tristram Shandy. The opening of Jacques le fataliste is an imitation of a passage from Sterne’s novel, where Corporal Trim, Uncle Toby’s ...”

“... it was quietly innovative. One of the team’s driving forces was a young Englishwoman, Blythe Masters; another, Terri Duhon, makes no secret of her upbringing in a trailer in Louisiana; central to its technical work was an Indian mathematician, Krishna Varikooty. Boisterousness that would have horrified John Pierpont ...”

“... them as sheep, given bloodstains as a shepherd’s mark by their alleged Irish Nationalist masters. He was happy to accept ‘Cleared’ on behalf of Henley, with whom Kipling thus forged an invaluable link. The poem appeared on 8 March 1890. Kipling was a late-comer, and had come in fresh, to the battle. He was also a dirty fighter, which delighted ...”

“... nebulous enemy from the other side of the world. It could be Bob Dylan performing his ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ (‘I discovered there was red stripes on the American flag’); but the year is 2002, and the song is ‘Talkin’ Al Kida Blues’ (‘Cuba’s our enemy, unless we need a prison camp’). Al Kida is the name of a man who lives ...”

“... will already know that Lincoln has four more years to live before he is shot by Herold’s friend, John Wilkes Booth, the most notorious of all those Americans who have sought to win fame by killing heroes and idols. In this urgent manner, blending the legendary and the humdrum, Gore Vidal introduces his story, like a 20th-century version of a Greek tragedy ...”

“... the big-city machines. There are some amusing vignettes which reveal the efforts of Presidents and masters of the communications industries to make use of one another. Scene: the Democratic National Convention of 1964. President Johnson, determined that his party confirm him, without any evidence of dissent, for an office he’d inherited by virtue of a ...”

“... theory has been known about for decades, they say, but has been roundly dismissed by Kinsey, Masters and Johnson and sundry other eminent sex-sleuths. But there is no shaking Mr John D. Perry and his two assistants Beverly Whipple and Alice Kahn Landis. In photographs, they seem a cheery, well-adjusted trio, but there ...”

“... than the licensed torture of a woman who knew women didn’t need men. By the time of John Badham’s 1979 Dracula, starring Frank Langella as ‘a Dracula of fusion’, the women have become ‘victims no more’, but passionate creatures liberated by his bite – seekers ‘who embrace vampirism as the sole available escape from ...”

“... bring them things’ – and the data supports that idea. In David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters’s excellent collection of Covid statistics, Covid by Numbers, we learn that three of the jobs with the highest UK levels of Covid mortality were chefs, cab drivers and bus drivers. No surprises there. The less well-off people are, the less likely they ...”

“... discreetly discarding their pro-British attitudes and cultivating connections with their future masters. It is natural that allegiances should change. There is nothing to be gained from currying favour with the British, and everything to be gained from wooing China – only with the sympathetic ear of the Chinese leadership can one hope to persuade it of ...”

“... have been inferences based on intuitions, in particular the intuition that certain sentences (‘John speaks fluently English’), though understandable, are nonetheless ‘in some way bad’, as Neil Smith and Nicholas Allott put it in their study of Chomsky, and that the ability to sense this badness is innate. Another piece of evidence for innateness, on ...”

“... by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two years) 38; Disbelief by John Ash (three years) 55; Ken Smith’s Wormwood, a collection of poems written during a spell as a writer in residence in Wormwood Scrubs (one year), 30. The justification for such work-rates, beyond the economics of scraping a living and the PR requirement of ...”

“... the agenda for much of Italian national life, both public and private. In the early 1960s, Pope John XXIII’s famous encyclicals, Mater et magistra (1961) and Pacem in Terris (1963), together with his summoning of the Second Vatican Council, produced great ferment in the Catholic world. But the radical tide ebbed, and the long and powerful pontificate of ...”

“... resurrected for some time to come. Coincident with the end of socialism in any meaningful sense, John Gray tells us that ‘a liberal political philosophy is an impossibility,’ and Ted Honderich announces that Conservatism is a nullity. If both of them are right and can be taken at face value, there does not seem to be much left. Dr Gray’s original ...”

“... should resist this kind of creeping socialisation. A Belgian musician and designer of automata, John Joseph Merlin, first skated on an early version of roller blades while playing the violin in 1760. But if roller-skating has a long history, it has only a short literature. Unlike cricket, it does not command literary partisans of the calibre of Harold ...”