“... On 23 May 1949, Lionel Gamlin, producer of the Light Programme’s Hello Children, wrote to Enid Blyton to ask whether she would be willing to be interviewed about the best holiday she could remember. ‘Dear Mr Gamlin,’ Blyton wrote the next day. ‘Thank you for your nice letter. It all sounds very interesting but I ought to warn you of something you obviously don’t know, but which has been well known in the literary and publishing world for some time – I and my stories are completely banned by the BBC as far as children are concerned ...”

“... with the most hard-line reverting to attitudes current in 1969. The success of Sinn Féin in the May elections added fuel to the fire, while the death of Elizabeth II and the recent census result, showing a Catholic majority in the North, are sure to increase unease.But loyalism has never been just one thing, and in Northern Protestants Susan McKay finds ...”

“... in for Aglietta’s absent sovereign power. On every occasion that panic came to a head – in May and November 2010 with the Greek and Irish bailouts; summer 2011 with tremors over Spanish and Italian bonds; November and December 2011 with the ousting of Papandreou and Berlusconi, followed by Cameron’s veto of the Fiscal Compact treaty; and summer 2012 ...”

“... slip the content straight down the reader’s throat, for content is what matters most. This may beg a lot more questions, but except to critics it is clear enough. When W.H. Davies says he saw the wind dragging the corn by her golden hair into a dark wood, the startling and exciting information goes straight inside us. Complex reactions then ...”

“... thereanent.’ Lear’s nonsense is full of mistakes that both the characters and their creator may or may not want to make, and Jenny Uglow’s absorbing new biography brings to the fore the question of the relation of his creativity to the accidence of his experience. In his diaries Lear often quotes or invokes his ...”

“... nuclear threat. ‘Those who would measure the timetable for Saddam’s atomic programme in years may be seriously underestimating that situation and the gravity of the threat,’ he claimed. An article in Time Magazine in December asked ‘How soon will Saddam get the bomb?’ It concluded: ‘Not nearly so soon as the Bush Administration claims.’ Stories ...”

“... of Clinton’s disastrous Presidency with the new prominence of the Family Values theme may now be in the process of creating not merely one but two new parties: one for anti-FV Republicans, and a second for socially conservative white Democrats, as opposed to old Republicans and so-called coalition Democrats (i.e. very-liberal ...”

“... centre’ concerned with the local history of immigration. Above the tiny synagogue is the room of David Rodinsky, a Polish Jew of increasingly mysterious reputation. Latterly described as a translator and philosopher, he is said to have lived here in some sort of caretaking capacity. One day in the Sixties Rodinsky stepped out into Princelet Street and ...”

“... sometime between 1808 and 1812. Like Goya’s better-known images of the Madrid uprising of 2 May 1808 and the bloody retribution that came after, the painting depicts the calamitous violence of the Peninsular War, which followed Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. But while Goya’s intentions are clear in El Dos and El Tres de Mayo, it is much less obvious ...”

“... head, rather than worn in a tight knot. I have never seen him dressed like that before, though it may have nothing to do with his recent ‘accident’. ‘Shlonak, Sheikh?’ I ask how he is in Iraqi Arabic. ‘Al hamdullilah’ (‘God be praised’). ‘Ahlan wa sahlan’ (‘Welcome’). ‘And I you, Mr Rory,’ he says, in a rare phrase of English, and ...”

“... Democrats should in turn have sought for a way to torpedo his personal reputation. Thomas may well turn out to be an able as well as a worthy man, and a good Supreme Court judge. But the manner of his appointment made it virtually impossible for him to seem anything other than George Bush’s token black, a beneficiary yet again of affirmative ...”

“... literary critics are going to have to come to some accommodation with Burke; at the very least, as David Bromwich proposes in quite another context, they may have to embrace a Burkean language but wrest it to non-Burkean ends. This means that the relationship with ‘New Historicism’ and its marxisant traditions will ...”

“... kind of battle with the Hollywood system. Given Ingrid Bergman’s own circumstances, she may have been thinking of his marital adventures. Soon after his father’s death in 1919, he married Catherine Hessling, one of Pierre-Auguste’s models. He began to make films as a showcase for her talents (or at least, ambitions) and their marriage broke down ...”

“... by the Moreel triptych and some thirty more works, was classed along with Van Eyck and Gerard David as the great Flemish primitive. On that occasion his particular Flemish religiosity (again with the less-than-convincing comparison to Fra Angelico) was emphasised. On the one hand, the very model of a Flemish primitive master; on the other, the German ...”

“... are translated as follows: ‘and they put to death the Leader of the Community, the Bran[ch of David ...] / and with woundings, and the (high) priest will command.’ The verb rendered as ‘woundings’ might be cognate with the verb meaning ‘to pierce’ that occurs in the Suffering Servant passage of Deutero-Isaiah, and Eisenman and Wise are happy to ...”