“... of Jarrow and always spoke for the workers. Yet this well-written biography surprises us: she may have been a founding spirit of the party but her interests, associations and beliefs took her a long way from the straightforward defence of the Labour Party as we have come to know it. At one point a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and ...”

“... of women with rounded bellies frolicking in baths connected by strange tubes, and a list of what may be alchemical or herbal recipes. No one knows its author or origins, and no one can read it. The faded brown script is written in an unknown alphabet that has baffled historians, cryptographers and bibliophiles for nearly six centuries. When Umberto Eco ...”

“... journeyman to a deep causal agent, lifting the lid on questions of love and loyalty as he goes. He may be a victim of the 20th century, but he is also one of its splendid creations, a man in league with his times, looking out for a vital connection. Jackie, the child of the ill-fitting Melvilles, thinks she might have caused the explosion that killed her ...”

“... in the summer of 1533, she was six months pregnant, and it is not unreasonable to think that she may have found the lengthy and elaborate ceremonies exhausting, but we’re told that ‘never had she loved life so much.’It is frustrating, too, that Hunting the Falcon doesn’t make more space for a consideration of the historical debate. There has been ...”

“... new levels of celebrity on the right aren’t lost – they are found.’ Wolf, as Klein says, may well still think Bannon is ‘the devil’, in which case she may be some sort of Faust. ‘She is getting everything she once had and lost – attention, respect, money, power. Just through a warped mirror.’‘Thank you ...”

“... the government appears to be entertaining the expansion of its nuclear weapons programme. In May the MoD suggested that the number of full-time army personnel might be increased from its current figure of 72,500 to 76,000 soldiers. But the SDR recommended no increase, though it did recognise ‘a strong case for a small increase in regular numbers when ...”

“... on bail are being given court dates in 2029. Victims and defendants are in limbo: the guilty ones may well think they’ve got away with it. Witnesses’ memories fade; some are no longer willing to engage with the process. It is an intolerable state of affairs. The number of defendants remanded in custody pending trial almost doubled between 2018 and ...”

“... the token tenantry of rustic characters, enigmatic, pragmatic, dogmatic, deeply enduring. Readers may detect an odour of Lawrence here and there, or catch a whiff of Cold Comfort Farm: but the scene is deepest Ireland. Onto this pastoral-mythical set Mr McGinley brings the machinery of a plot derived from the parable of the talents. On his 77th ...”

“... right-wing electoral politics, through the generation of co-operative economic development, and may prove to be a far more powerful agent for North American interests than the CIA can ever be. As developmental economists realised in the Sixties, and as the American banks were to learn in the Eighties, underdevelopment, once the underpinning of the European ...”

“... to remain, on first-name terms with the media phenomenon whose personal and material success may often have been envied or deplored in his lifetime, but is now applauded everywhere – very properly when measured against the talent and hard work invested in it, less so when it is seen as another rallying-point for the enemies of Modernism. If in the ...”

“... well until Avril, Orwell’s sister, turned up and decided she wanted to stay. Susan Watson ‘may have felt overly sensitive to any criticism from Avril, and in her own mind the comments about her disability may have taken on more importance than Avril had intended. But she could not have been mistaken about the feeling ...”

“... British popular politics. The present series is a selection and not the complete output, and we may be thankful for that. It could have been pruned down more. I find Volume I – Political Writings I – superfluous, apart from the editor’s general introduction to the series; as are Volumes VI, Essays, and VII, Religious Writings. These will be useful to ...”

“... Here is John Locke on the subject of second-hand knowledge in philosophy and the sciences: we may as rationally hope to see with other men’s eyes as to know by other men’s understandings. So much as we ourselves consider and comprehend of truth and reason, so much we possess of real and true knowledge. The floating of other men’s opinions in our ...”

“... case, could you please be so good as to return it to me. My apologies for any inconvenience this may cause to you or to your publishers. Thank you. ‘Dear Mr Peters,’ the reply went, ‘Mr Greene has not received your passport and he can’t imagine for what reason you sent your passport to him for safe-keeping as he is not in the habit of being a ...”

“... word’s range of reference can appear to trivialise the tragedy it originally designated. There may even be grounds for suspecting that the multiplication of parallels to the Judcocide is itself a form of covert anti-semitism. In these circumstances, trying to define the Holocaust in terms appropriate to it seems more than defensible. All the same, you ...”