“... across the South traverse ... If proceeding west (i.e. from Sty Head) the two rising branch-paths may be followed by mistake without realising that the traverse has been left, they being the more distinct, a circumstance that does not arise when proceeding east. And so on and so forth, for something like two hundred fells. Should we really treat the ...”

“... of their kind, make a satisfying and legible symptom, and they affirm the hope that the personal may be the political. Mary is a tissue of reshuffled data from Wollstonecraft’s life. The heroine escapes from her family to solitude and books (‘Thomson’s Seasons, Young’s Night-Thoughts and Paradise Lost’), and finds an older woman, Ann, who seems ...”

“... Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Final Solution and Himmler’s deputy, shaking hands in May 1942 with Darquier de Pellepoix, charged by the German occupiers and the Vichy government with delivering France’s quota of Jews for deportation. The name was familiar. Between 1963 and 1970, she had been treated three times a week by a psychoanalyst named ...”

“... represents the interests of mining, logging, chemicals and agribusiness. However true it may be that Gore and Bush were the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of corporate America, most Nader supporters would have preferred a different outcome. That they ended up with Bush is another example of a hardy perennial: the historical importance of unintended ...”

“... in Werl and Wittlich; the Americans released the last of their war criminals from Landsberg in May 1958. Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach remained in Spandau, under joint four-power auspices, and a few individuals continued to be imprisoned by other nations. Herbert Kappler, the former police chief of Rome, briefly made headlines when he ...”

“... anything in the way of description or biography. With so little to modulate 642 pages, readers may sometimes feel on a bit of a forced march themselves, and Mikaberidze’s penchant for commonplaces doesn’t help (e.g. ‘India has been described by 19th-century contemporaries as the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire’).The book has a ...”

“... other novels and stories. Such children are at the centre of William Trevor’s tenth novel and David Profumo’s first; or rather, Trevor seems to have chosen to place young Tom both centrally and peripherally (as children often are, in fiction and in life), while Profumo makes young James the very eyes and ears of his book, though distancing him by ...”

“... are drugs which are structurally similar to chemicals required for normal cellular processes, and may halt cell division or growth. In the summer of 1947 Sidney Farber, a specialist in children’s diseases, diagnosed acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) in the two-year-old son of a Boston shipyard worker. ALL almost always killed, sometimes within days of ...”

“... of ‘Dutch Graves in Bucks County’, a poem that Wallace Stevens published in 1943. The image may have come from a march-of-time documentary of Americans training to fight in the Second World War. Probably the machines included tanks and a lorry convoy, possibly a squadron of fighter planes. What became of the angry men when the war was over? I grew up in ...”

“... Bible into Chinese. (‘He boned up feverishly on Manchu,’ enthuses his other biographer, David Williams, in his schoolboyish way.) Borrow had to argue in Russian with the Tsar’s board of censors, hire and supervise ill-educated Estonian compositors to set up Mongolian print (which, he said, ‘differs little from the Mandchou’) and prepare to ...”

“... the excitement of the success of their ploy, Blair and his (former?) spokesperson (ventriloquist?) may have strayed towards it. Given that it remains the case that a neocolonial war has been fought to please neo-conservative friends in an administration despised abroad and at home, this crowing may prove not to have been the ...”

“... There​ are some fine shots of the title thoroughfare in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), a new release from the Criterion Collection. It’s all bushes and darkness and bends in the road, various cars’ tail-lights appearing and disappearing. Anything could happen there, especially since there are some very posh residences among the shrubs ...”

“... By being ornamental in this sense they were able to be meaningful in others which Michelangelo may not have been fully conscious of and which are hard to put into words. There is no discussion here of the respectable channels provided in the Renaissance for the sublimation of homosexuality, nor of the metaphors then available with which a celibate might ...”

“... they change every now and again, shows a strange relation to facts. On balance, Hill’s book may well be quite a good introduction for social workers to systems of social security, personal social services, the health service, education, employment services and housing: but oh, is it one-dimensional and uninspiring, even where it quotes the unorthodox ...”

“... Like his predecessors, he is effectively without a job until the throne becomes vacant – which may not be until well into the next century. Meanwhile there is no longer an empire to provide him with the appropriate apprenticeship of a proconsular posting, and he is understandably eager to do more than accompany his wife on her shopping trips. But while his ...”