“... does not exclude the possibility that the former USS Phoenix, survivor of Pearl Harbour, was sunk by Mrs Thatcher, not because the 44-year-old threatened our boys, but because politically Mrs Thatcher could not afford peace. Readers of the London Review of Books include among their number a significant proportion of those who operate in the stratosphere of ...”

“... a judge and two magistrates in a range of cases in which defendants can currently choose trial by jury rather than trial by magistrates; he also recommends that many offences become exclusively triable by magistrates alone. These offences include things like benefit fraud and ...”

“... philosophy. Marx was exiled, Socrates poisoned. Moses Maimonides, known in the Jewish tradition by the honorific ‘Rambam’ (for Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, his real name), was celebrated centuries after his death as a towering figure in both philosophy and law, but in his own day was a controversial figure. The Provençal rabbi Abraham ben ...”

“... activity may puzzle the lay person. Holden’s final pages report Olivier alive, as well as can be expected at 81, residing tranquilly in the Sussex countryside, still swimming occasional lengths of his pool in the altogether and attending the first nights of the three children who have followed Joan Plowright and himself into the theatre. Anyone likely to ...”

“... which was deplored even at the time of the centenary of publication 38 years ago, when Elizabeth David pointed out that the currently available Mrs Beeton didn’t contain a single recipe from the original. That this is an odd state of affairs does not of itself make a facsimile of the 1861 book an interesting object. People buy and use the modern Mrs Beeton ...”

“... earth and the stubble’. Frenchmen approach. ‘Who are they? Are they coming at me? Can they be running at me? And why? To kill me? Me whom everyone is so fond of?’ His family’s love makes it seem impossible that these people intend to kill him. Then as a Frenchman bears down with fixed bayonet, Nikolai flings his pistol at him and runs for the ...”

“... protesting at its treatment of the academic spinster Margaret, a woman whose sole offence was to be physically unattractive to young men. As the woman question has grown more noticeable, Amis’s gallery of male chauvinists has grown too, until in Stanley and the Women he has created a world in which only men appear to communicate with one another, and their ...”

“... Most of my first literary influences – if they can be called such – came from the cinema. I remember some time during the early Forties seeing a film, one of those ‘B’ pictures from Hollywood, which had for its subject the life of the great British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli. The scene that comes back is during a debate in the House of Commons on some great issue, when Disraeli sat with eyes closed, seemingly asleep, while the Leader of the Opposition, probably Mr Gladstone, went through his speech ...”

“... probably the most important book yet to appear in the dissident-Communist perspective. Fortunately David Fernbach’s translation makes it accessible (apart from a few Volapük lapses like ‘genial’ for génial) and copes ruggedly with the steeper philosophical faces. The perspective itself is questionable, however. Without objecting for a moment to the ...”

“... of the screen, go round to the back of the car. Cut to a view of the boot of the car, followed by a short, slow tracking movement to bring us closer to it. A reverse angle shot shows the three men. De Niro nods to Liotta, Pesci takes a broad butcher’s knife from his belt, the camera pans slightly towards the car. We see Liotta, from the back, cautiously ...”

“... By​ the time his first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, had its premiere at Covent Garden in 1955, Michael Tippett was considered, alongside Benjamin Britten, the most significant and original British composer of his generation. Yet he was also the natural outsider in a scene that as well as Britten (born 1913), included William Walton (1902) and Lennox Berkeley (1903), with the reassuring presence of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872) hovering over them all ...”

“... in part-time or full-time work. In return, among other things, your workplace grievances will be addressed by the IWGB’s activist machine. ‘Our approach is, hit employers where they’re weak,’ Moyer-Lee said with a smile. ‘Ramp up public pressure, using social media and ...”

“... of him so perhaps it’s just that his eyes are cast down to scrutinise its pages. But that would be difficult since it is evidently night-time: above him, an owl (or perhaps it’s a bat) flies across a large moon that looms over a range of rounded hills. From among them a spindly church spire can just be seen stretching ...”

“... old gold signet ring bearing on its bezel the initials ‘W.S.’ It was bought for 36 shillings by Robert Bell Wheler, a local historian, and later donated to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where it still resides. When the Romantic painter Benjamin Robert Haydon heard news of the discovery he wrote excitedly to his friend Keats: ‘If this is not ...”

“... in the narrative is a powerfully expressive feature of a book whose formal intricacy could be thought the most interesting thing about it. Of course, we only fully appreciate the novel’s structural virtues once we have finished reading it, and if we came to it fresh from the invigorating experience of Sabbath’s Theatre or the American Trilogy or ...”