“... claims in his essential new book, claiming that Rohingyas were in Arakan well before 1784, and may even have arrived there before the Buddhist Rakhine. Ibrahim offers a credible genealogy that links Rohingyas to Indo-Aryan groups who arrived from the Ganges Valley as early as 3000 bc. He also charts the evolution of their language and script, which has ...”

“... was spiked, and I don’t have it, or the book, or much memory of the book. Of course, this one may be spiked as well, but I’ve now read Like a Fading Shadow four times, and I can see it will be one of a handful of books I open and start reading – somewhere, anywhere – at least once a year for the rest of my life. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids ...”

“... of Mr Love in Mr Hayter, Miss Joy casts against type, and finds happiness. Changing your name may be what restores you to yourself. Miss Joy is truly joyful in the end, by virtue of becoming Mrs Hayter. There is a romantic novel to be glimpsed in this stanza: how, we might ask, did Miss Joy part company with Mr Love? Did she only choose him, but not marry ...”

“... of the prize (in his acceptance speech he credited the role Anthony Minghella’s film adaptation may have played in that result). These novels, really, are romances, in the sense that everything that happens in them is charged with magic, nothing is merely ordinary or redundant, everything finally connects together inside some larger esoteric scheme – even ...”

“... Della is the furthest thing available to literature from a prostitute, whatever that thing may be. Jack, though fallen, is careful to free himself of base sexual intent. They share a love of poetry. Her presence beside him reminds him of Milton’s embracing angels: ‘total they mix, union of pure with pure.’ They sit through the night among the ...”

“... considers a tangle of clothes on the floor, brushing aside the thought that he may have just raped one of his students: ‘After the storm, he thinks: straight out of George Grosz.’ In Pasolini’s Porcile, the industrialist Herr Klotz lies in bed, worried he’s losing his son to left-wing radicalism. ‘The days of Grosz and Brecht are ...”

“... a fictional world of horror.The story involves a supernatural force called the Darkness, which may provide the secret of immortality if placated with enough blood. Its existence is known only to a group of ‘Initiates’ – the Order, whose members are overwhelmingly part of the ruling class. The Order needs mediums to access the Darkness, and it has ...”

“... main plot.The life and works of the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874) may serve as an epitome. After studying mathematics, Quetelet persuaded the Belgian Government to send him to Paris to study astronomy with Pierre-Simon de Laplace, the acknowledged doyen of the discipline. There he imbibed not only Laplace’s celestial ...”

“... of course: ‘Liberty versus Communism; Reagan-Bush ’84.’ And even today, whatever people may think in other regions of the United States, Miami remains unrepentantly, exuberantly Reagan country. Indeed, what is most remarkable about Cuban Miami is that here may be found the staunchest of the right-wing true ...”

“... life peer who could convincingly be cast in the role of even the feeblest village Hampden. Peers may speechify to their hearts’ content, but the party which controls the House of Commons can reverse any defeat inflicted on it in the House of Lords as it pleases. If it doesn’t, it’s nothing to do with respect for individual liberty or the public ...”

“... MI5 and MI6, whose activities continued until the abrupt departure of Burgess and Maclean in late May 1951. Until then, Britain’s security services had been sleeping, as though Josef Stalin had prepared a heavy sleeping draught for them. Blake’s MI6 masters liked his style, his linguistic talents and his quiet demeanour. He had no difficulty in joining ...”

“... not refutable in the way that a law is, but only replaceable by a superior theory, a theory which may indeed maintain some if not all of the laws of the earlier theory.’ Such elegant removal of the goal-posts to a different field of play is a feature of the Chomskyan argument to which proponents of other linguistic philosophies most commonly take ...”

“... up a conventionally romantic vision, then holds it up to ridicule. His autobiographical sketches may be nourished by nostalgia, but the nostalgia is not proof against the corrosive acid of his famous disillusionment. He is not lamenting the past for being beautiful and over: he is punishing it for being phoney and containing the seeds of the present. The ...”

“... unknown. Perhaps it says something about our cultural values that, in informed society, people may never have heard of a scientist such as Maxwell when even a British schoolboy would be considered grossly uneducated if he had never heard of Dickens. The publication of the first volume (of three) of Maxwell’s scientific papers and letters gives us a rare ...”

“... since then in electronics and computing power, and the black market in weapons-grade plutonium, may not have made it as easy now as many people, including Cathcart, fear. On the test itself, a combined operation of nightmarish difficulty at a site only marginally preferable to Piccadilly Circus, Cathcart actually outdoes his mistresses. And across it all ...”