“... to resign and others, including the head of the SDECE (France’s equivalent of MI6 at the time), took early retirement. The state and the deep state are not two things but all of a piece, in what we call democracies as well as in dictatorships. Talk of the deep state in Egypt suggested that its discovery was an unpleasant surprise, which indicates a good ...”

“... Boston . . . Portland . . . Bangor . . . Meductic . . . Sydney, Nova Scotia . . . St John’s, Newfoundland. Then the trail goes cold: it is said he enlisted in the crew of a Danish fishing boat. It was probably during this journey that Cravan’s last extant literary text was written. A sheaf of what might be called ‘automatic writings’, it ...”

“... Dickens’s suffering as he later and very emotionally recalled it for his friend and biographer, John Forster. He was not beaten, starved or ill-treated in any way. The factory was run by an acquired cousin, the son of a widower who had married Dickens’s aunt. He worked there for a year or less before returning to school and normal middle-class life. What ...”

“... on. Five of its six costliest battles, with casualties in the tens of thousands on each side, took place after April 1863, roughly the war’s midpoint. It ended, as the Second World War ended, in an epic struggle for the enemy’s capital. A century and a half later one can still see the miles of ramparts at Petersburg and Richmond; the crater blasted by ...”

“... will crumble and where the new frontiers will coalesce. Medawar’s ‘genius’, his colleague John Maynard Smith told me, ‘was a bit unexpected. He had a genius for thinking of the right experiment which I enormously envy. I don’t have it myself: I never think of the right experiment. If I do an experiment at all, it’s usually the wrong one. Nor did ...”

“... and name-dropping. Not surprisingly, Lowell was not amused. The same disapproval fills his ‘John Wain’s Letters to Five More Artists’. The target is not just the peculiarly discursive poetry Wain invented in Wildtrack and its sequel, but the poet himself, who is presented as lacking proportion in marshalling great past artists to his ...”

“... weak introduction to his attack on the present Pope. Of course it is true, as O’Brien says, that John Paul II is an authoritarian and an obscurantist. (It could almost be said that these qualities come with the territory.) It is likewise the case that the Vatican and the Muslim extremists made common cause at the world population conference in Cairo. Yet ...”

“... overdue attention. Lawrence’s enemies still deny his comedy, which was often self-deprecating. John Carey, who wants all writers to be nice (ideally, as decent as Arnold Bennett), wrote a book about the nastiness of various modern writers called The Intellectuals and the Masses. In it Lawrence is scolded for his ‘fascism’, his ecstasies of ...”

“... more detailed and more steadily critical. Like Bourne, he concentrates on the years before Castro took power. In a text of 542 pages, Fidel does not enter Havana until page 373, and the ‘maturity’ of 1964-1986 is covered in a mere 55 pages; prior to taking power, Castro had of course done much less for a biographer to be critical about. It is the best ...”

“... but still dramatic falls have been taking place in other states of the former Soviet Union). John Lloyd intends no irony in his title, but his book covers a time when Russians have abandoned birth in a big way. A new Russia may be in the process of being born, but new Russians are not. Far more serious than the refusal to reproduce is the collapse in ...”

“... getting away from Cambridge on frequent trips to Europe. He worked for a time in the studio of John La Farge and might have become a talented painter; he went with Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition to the Amazon; he received a degree in medicine from Harvard, where, despite his abhorrence of laboratory work and mostly to please his father, he ...”

“... of Wight, the town which Charlotte described, twenty years later, in ‘Ken’:   So when they took Ken to that place, I did not look   After he called, and turned on me   His eyes. These I shall see – Ken, however, is represented as an amiable idiot, whereas both Henry and Freda were victims of what was then called dementia praecox – that ...”

“... ethical code controls that voice? What does it echo, in the long history of warfare examined by John Keegan and Richard Holmes in their book-of-the-television-series, Soldiers? It looks to me as if fighting men have adhered to perhaps half a dozen different codes. There is the ‘rape and pillage’ style: a gang of men sets off to plunder a wealthy ...”

“... According to John Constable, the trouble with self-taught painters was that they had such bad teachers. Creative writing workshops notwithstanding, every novelist is self-taught. An enduring reminder of this is Cervantes’s relationship with his equivocal double masterpiece Don Quixote, and the most persuasive analyst of both book and author remains E ...”

“... than metre. The stakes are raised (though the game remains essentially the same) in ‘SDI’ by John Levett, where the briskly-handled iambic pentameter stiffens a pleasant holiday conceit and gives it seriousness and point:Ten miles above the tits at St TropezA satellite’s remote, panoptic eyeIs tracking us and quietly waiting forThe gesture that could ...”