“... continuities of its elites and institutions. Italy, on the other hand, has been shaped by its geopolitical position at the centre of the Mediterranean, looking in one direction towards the Levant and in the other towards Spain. Deep-rooted Mediterranean cultures of patronage and of clientelism, of family and of clan, have combined with a weak state ...”

“... Separation from England seemed inevitable in the long run. En route, Scottish politics would be hampered by a systemic instability. After all, the anti-devolutionists whined, the Nationalists needed to win only once in Scottish parliamentary elections to bring about independence; to preserve the Union, the parties of ...”

“... When he published The Ice Storm in 1994, Rick Moody seemed to be looking for a workable compromise between suburban realism and what Gore Vidal once called the ‘Research and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on ...”

“... with werewolves and fallen women. A flourishing industry in the study of travel writing can be traced to much the same sources. Criticism is becoming a minor offshoot of science fiction, even if it presents the exotic and outlandish only to upbraid such notions as imperialist. ‘We are obsessed with “barbarians”,’ Claude Rawson remarks in this ...”

“... state, poised between the last days of a constitutional republic and the republic’s takeover by a dynasty of merchant bankers bent on becoming lords. Two people assured that takeover over the course of three generations stretching across most of the 15th century: Cosimo de’ Medici, the wily banker who procured himself the ancient Roman title of Pater ...”

“... The​ Labour Party may be the largest party after the next election, and it may even secure a majority, but it could also do very badly. These alternatives show Labour’s decline since the first couple of years of the coalition, when a Labour victory in 2015 was (more or less) confidently predicted. The change is reflected in the party’s mood: in the nerviness, the timidity and the stress-induced gaffes ...”

“... can’t and therefore hate.) A major contributor to this sense of unchartedness was the decision by the ratings agency Standard and Poor’s to downgrade US government debt from AAA to AA+ status. This might seem like a small technical point, and it’s worth noting that the downgrade had no effect on the price of the debt, meaning that the markets felt it ...”

“... this Protestant kingdom’. This was the primary reason King James II was forced out and replaced by reliably Protestant co-rulers, William and Mary. This Revolution brought in its train several other constitutional changes. Within two decades the succession had been diverted through the Act of Settlement (1701) to the Protestant Hanoverian line whose direct ...”

“... just tired. His cutlery is untouched, and his arms are hidden under the table, as if restrained by their own heft. ‘One is cautioned by the better critics never to write about photographs,’ Shteyngart writes earlier in his book, just before he describes a family photo in which he’s lodged between his parents ...”

“... on the edge of the spur of the boot-shaped Italian peninsula. It has been somewhat bypassed by Italy’s postwar development and has never been on the tourist circuit, or indeed had anything about it that might attract outsiders. The railway didn’t even reach it until 1931. To judge by the photo in the current ...”

“... researching his subject’s ‘savage pilgrimage’ but actually getting on with what turns out to be the book’s real business, which is to obsess at length about what he himself, writer, flâneur, free-floating stoner, is supposedly doing with his life. He envies them sometimes, ‘those with jobs’, because unlike him they have a structure to fit into, a ...”

“... Before it was a classic film, Gone with the Wind was a classic PR stunt. The film’s producer, David O. Selznick, announced that he would launch a nationwide search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved irresistible ...”

“... narrates the slow and difficult recognition of a condition that had been concealed since antiquity by male doctors’ theories about the ‘uterine’ irrationality of women. Micale could scarcely have found a better image to introduce his ‘hidden history’ than the scene from Huston’s film. He seems, however, not to know that Huston had during the Second ...”

“... scrambling computers) and superglue. The army is bankrupt, and the police force is disabled by corruption and general ineptitude. So – much like the 17th-century high seas – America’s highways are, de facto, beyond the law. It’s hard to distinguish between the homeless nomad ‘prole’ pirates and the military officers who set up road blocks ...”

“... It was the last of Britain’s three (that we know of) national secret services to be founded, and has the lowest public profile. (How many spy novels can you think of that feature ‘sigint’, aside from Robert Harris’s Enigma?) Yet today it is probably the most important, and certainly the most expensive. It is housed in Cheltenham in ...”