“... mainshock before its occurrence.’ On 30 March, Giuliani says he was forbidden from making any more public pronouncements. The next day, a special meeting of the Commissione Nazionale per la Previsione e Prevenzione dei Grandi Rischi was convened in L’Aquila (the commission usually met in Rome). ‘It is unlikely that an earthquake like the one in ...”

“... to 70 years after the death of the author, came into force in Britain on 1 January 1996. They are more lenient in cases where copyright was revived rather than merely extended, and publishing material copied from 1922 – most of the words in the ‘Reader’s Edition’ – wasn’t unlawful, Mr Justice Lloyd ruled, but payment of royalties was required. For ...”

“... teacher who would like to spend her time reading Keats and Donne with her pupils; still, there’s more than one type of ambiguity, and it’s clear enough which type Humphrys has in mind: politicians rather than poets are his targets. He also hates ‘management speak’: ‘Each specialist library will be the product of a community of practice of all those ...”

“... the rules of how a certain kind of movie should be made, and are sure to delight the crowds even more. For the sequels to live up to The Matrix will be difficult, and it’s small wonder that both were filmed together, part three to be released in November: to be that different three times in a row would surely be impossible – just look what happened to ...”

“... a German shepherd bitch and her five puppies, which lived in one of the bunker’s bathrooms. Ever more dissociated from the outside world, he continued to issue impossible orders to armies that no longer existed, and had officers appointed, sacked and executed as the whim took him. Within hours of Hitler’s suicide, General Hans Krebs set out to pay a visit ...”

“... Donne’s greatness as axiomatic. I still enjoy much of Donne much of the time, but will grant more readily that Dryden and Johnson had a point: conspicuous cleverness is not always a good thing. It can go too far, and seem merely frivolous. There are moments, subjects and genres where it feels out of place. The usual advice – read a poet’s best ...”

“... is the best measure, they found that 77.3 per cent of those questioned thought reading ‘can be more exciting than watching a film’, 81.8 per cent thought it could be more exciting than TV and, ‘staggeringly’, 23.7 per cent thought it ‘can be more exciting than sex’. You could ...”

“... shrine: here are great names, great subjects, not examination-notes. The Village Press offers more than sixty books by and about J. C. Powys and his brothers – and there is much more to come, numerous letters to collect. That word ‘village’ links rural Britain, Vole country, with Greenwich Village. So does ...”

“... him a good 50 years younger than Wilson – and it’s not straightforwardly a novel, either. More a set of notes. Wilson appears to subscribe to the unorthodox ‘tell don’t show’ school of fiction-writing. Raff’s cousin, for example, is introduced as ‘a strikingly pretty blonde but something of an airhead whose principal interest was boys and ...”

“... And it’s all disturbingly free. Although the internet has spread around the world, it’s used more intensively in some places than others. One of Zook’s useful maps shows that more than 35 per cent of the population of North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan use the internet, but the figure for ...”

“... could be treated with a simple course of antibiotics. But the pharmaceutical industry is a more interesting, more morally ambiguous subject than, say, the arms trade – with which it’s explicitly compared in the film – because its side effects include treating disease, easing pain and preserving life, and no ...”

“... Eagar​ made his career taking photographs of cricketers, though when he started out in London more than fifty years ago his subjects were mainly party people. In 1966, he took a picture with his Leica of someone he’d never heard of: Oskar Schindler. ‘It is not an exciting shot,’ he once said. ‘But it exists. It is just about the only photograph I ...”

“... the Germans fought a war to assert theirs – or so many German intellectuals felt in August 1914. Thomas Mann’s contribution to this eruption of nationalist self-consciousness was delivered in a series of essays written over the following four years, and it is among the strangest things he ever wrote. Not the least paradox of this exacting, ambitious and ...”

“... the maskers seem to improvise witty or pathetic dialogue, according to an agreed storyline. D.M. Thomas remarks that he is indebted to Germaine Greer for supplying him with information about the tradition of the improvisatrici in Italy: he has constructed Swallow (‘the second,’ he says, ‘in a series of improvisational novels’) in the form of a story ...”

“... shades vigilantly or solicitously hovering over their shoulders as they write. The biographer of Thomas Carlyle is supervised more severely than most: the irritable, brooding Scotsman, the would-be redeemer, and, failing that, the scourge of Victorian England, seems to breathe flame down his neck. To write about Carlyle ...”