“... an ageing widower. His wife Nadia, once the beautiful young girl, has died of cancer. Their son, David-Rico, has taken off to India-Nepal-Thailand, as all young Israelis do, if you believe the fuss, as Oz seems to, about ‘migration’ in the Israeli media. The son’s girlfriend, Dita, lives in Tel Aviv, in a district frequented (if you believe the fuss in ...”

“... book can readily be compared to works like Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend (David Shipman), Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (Steven Bach), or biographies of the Kennedys. It is characteristic of many such books that they begin far back, with early antecedents, and in the case of Seabiscuit there are many to account for, from Charles ...”

“... seems reserved, in the film, for her son. In 1962, what happened to Raymond Shaw and his men may have seemed fantastic, but perhaps no more so than the news that had emerged five years earlier that American POWs in Korea had made false confessions, and, shockingly, that some had decided against repatriation. As a 1957 New York Times story put it: ‘For ...”

“... Craig has been signed up for the American remake of the first film, which will be directed by David Fincher. The quest to find Lisbeth Salander took on Scarlett O’Hara proportions; the role has been filled with attendant fanfare by Rooney Mara, who was introduced to the world in Fincher’s last movie, The Social Network. (It will be interesting to see ...”

“... on the pilot got up and running. ‘Shut off your cameras,’ said the arresting officer, which may be what Los Angeles police say now instead of reading people their Miranda Rights. But don’t worry: the cameras were back on soon enough to catch the family deploring the idea that Alexis was a thief. ‘Maybe this was just the universe sending a wake-up ...”

“... of 2008? Ferguson argues strongly that it does not. The advent of the hostile takeover bid may have presaged a more aggressive style of capitalism, but the eurobond market was in many ways financially conservative – turning hot money into a stable source of long-term capital. Ferguson’s main point, however, is that Warburg was a strong advocate of ...”

“... in the second half of the 20th century, of Britain’s manufacturing industry. The universities may have played some part in this decline; but a greater part was played by Britain’s business culture. It is a curiosity of this document – and of the attitudes of successive British governments – that the relationship between business and the universities ...”

“... groundbreaking experiments were undertaken by Nikos Logothetis, working with Jeffrey Schall and David Leopold. It had been known since the 19th century that if quite different images are shown to each of your eyes at the same time, your conscious experience doesn’t blend the two but flips between them. If one of your eyes is shown a face and the other is ...”

“... referendum desired by Alex Salmond, but were forced in the two-option referendum permitted by David Cameron to choose between the stark alternatives of Union or independence.* In the latter stages of the campaign, as Devine warns his readers, he lent his name to the ‘Yes’ camp. But Devine is diffident about venturing into the political arena, and in ...”

“... covertly in his Memoirs (1991), there’s a feeling that Larkin’s poems, splendid though they may be, are in need of corrective piss-taking and don’t carry the weight that ‘any novel does’. After his death, in 1995, Amis took less of a battering than Larkin had. Martin Amis’s Experience (2000) softened the prevailing image of him as the meanest ...”

“... it until his death. After he had swallowed something once, he never stopped taking the medicine. David Caute begins The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (1973) with the story of Hewlett and Nowell escaping from the World Peace Council and clambering aboard a local bus going they knew not where and Hewlett saying to the driver: ‘Tickets ...”

“... longer invest so much in mere association – it has at least been put in its place. John McCain may be launching ugly spots with increasingly crude and mendacious claims about his opponent; Barack Obama’s media teams will certainly spotlight their man’s high cheekbones and trim good looks, even when he’s talking up his tax plans. But cheerful ...”

“... and despite the Union leadership’s attempt to calm the atmosphere, the press made much of it. It may have struck the administration that it was beginning to look like the weaker partner in this careful rapprochement with Islam; in any case, by the summer, with public thinking about the veil taking another ungenerous turn, Chirac moved to set up the ...”

“... The narrator remembers his own flights from home, and fantasises about the dreams of freedom Dora may have had, ‘the illusion that the passage of time is suspended, and that you need only slip through this breach to escape the trap which is closing around you’. But of course these are his thoughts, and he knows nothing of what Dora felt. He also knows, or ...”

“... are a proper visible expression of forces at work on the structure. The final result, according to David Newland, technical adviser to the bridge’s funding body, is ‘probably the most complex passively-damped structure in the world’. (In an actively-damped system an input of energy is required to answer the force with a counterforce; in a passive ...”