“... true. The major problem is that when Stern writes about the historic importance of individuals he means several quite different things at once. The least convincing claim concerns those individuals who ‘by themselves’ shaped world history. I doubt whether Stern really believes that the personal will of tyrants adequately explains the barbarities of our ...”

“... of the novel through digital storytelling (slim, thus far, would seem to be the upshot). By no means all the relevant reasons and contexts are Western. Andrew Plaks, for example, argues for the existence in China, from the early 16th to the late 19th century, of ‘works of extended prose fiction that, if not perfectly consonant with all of the aesthetic ...”

“... a bit remote, severe with himself but gentle to others, capable of laughter but ‘by no means a party animal’. The meta-message of Coetzee’s co-operation comes across as ‘nothing much to see here’, and that’s mostly the case with the biography too. The same can’t be said of Here and Now, a collection of communications between Coetzee and ...”

“... the characters’ rich, funny thought-lives, but they can’t access one another’s. Their chief means of understanding other people, and the world, is not speech but sight. The opening section, ‘The Party’, is told from the point of view of an unnamed elderly widow living alone with her cat in a terraced house, her solitude broken only by visits ‘once ...”

“... professor to the University of Edinburgh who was thrilled to learn that his office would be in David Hume Tower. Picturing a fortified keep adorned with stepped gables and corbelled turrets, he was sorely disappointed on arrival to discover that the tower was a fourteen-storey Brutalist slab.The tower has always been controversial. Conservation groups ...”

“... about Enright’s life and work by a variety of writers. This festschrift’s title, Life by Other Means, derives from an Enright poem called ‘Poetical Justice’ which muses rather more ambiguously on the relations between art and life than the stirring phrase might suggest in isolation. Dr Johnson, one of Enright’s touchstones, records how he was so ...”

“... well known than the Grand National but more prestigious. (The Grand National is a handicap, which means the best horse doesn’t often win: the better you are the more weight you have to carry, making it more of a lottery; the Gold Cup is run on merit.) The regular punters at the Tufnell Park branch of Coral weren’t exactly professional gamblers but they ...”

“... The volunteers agreed to have sex with these men, to infiltrate their social networks, and by that means to find out as much as possible about the extent and organisation of male homosexual activity in Newport. The decoys soon discovered that the Army and Navy YMCA was the most popular hangout for ‘fairies’, by which they referred to men who violated ...”

“... Fourteen inches by 11, and weighing six pounds 13 ounces, David O. Selznick’s Hollywood is less a coffee-table book than a coffee table without legs. Its credits ape a blockbuster movie’s: ‘Executive Producer: Robert Gottlieb – Associate Producer: Martha Kaplan’, etc; and its first page opens like cinema curtains on a wider-than-Panavision main title modelled on Gone with the Wind ...”

“... on the European Journal of International Law’s blog, the legalistic treatment of atrocities means that ‘states are given the benefit of the doubt in relation to ongoing abuses’ and ‘this enables other states (and other powerful entities) to appeal to plausible legality in erring on the side of facilitating atrocity in real time’. Our new foreign ...”

“... Greek and Roman Rulers’.This in itself was not necessarily big news. The Swedish diplomat Johann David Åkerblad had already correctly deduced the signs for P and T in the hieroglyphic version of Ptolemy, suggesting that the lion stood for LO; the next, which looks like the front of a Eurostar train, for M; while in 1819 the British polymath Thomas Young ...”

“... of balancing the skewed picture of the Crusades in Western scholarship.’ I’m not sure what he means by this. David Hume, in his History of Great Britain (1754-62), denounced the Crusades as ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’. Gibbon considered them to be ...”

“... from territories occupied’ in 1967. The third principle affirmed diplomacy as the only viable means of resolving the conflict and protecting both Israeli and Arab state interests – even at the expense of popular wishes and rights.The 1973 war confirmed that the state of Israel was here to stay and wasn’t going to be defeated militarily. Two months ...”

“... activity; and his most recent full-length opera, Gawain, has an ambitious verse libretto by David Harsent. Ted Hughes once wrote a libretto for Gordon Crosse. The Story of Vasco, whose subject-matter involves crows, is an interesting opera by a composer who has now, regrettably, stopped composing. The poet John Birtwhistle supplied ...”

“... He has been, in his own words, ‘a consistent anti-totalitarian’, though he admits that this means ‘one might have to expose oneself to steadily mounting contradictions.’ He has had to adjust himself, intellectually and geographically, to his growing taste for the United States and his sense of its power to do good in the world. He moved to the US ...”