“... His books appear to be conceived on the principle laid down by Dr Greenslade at the beginning of John Buchan’s The Three Hostages, as the proper way to write a ‘shocker’: ‘The author writes the story inductively, and the reader follows it deductively ... I begin by fixing on one or two facts which have no obvious connection ... imagine anything you ...”

“... is so convincingly specified that it explains the development of others whose treachery took a different form and was therefore known by a different name, if indeed it was classified at all: Bran well Brontë, for example, who had inspired in me nothing but a passing irritation before, but who, I came to think, had so much in common with William ...”

“... an element of explanation to the problem of why it was in England that the Industrial Revolution took place. Clearly pre-industrial England had a relatively rich and sophisticated economy in which the market element was strong enough to cope with basic harvest fluctuations, and which developed a system of public aid capable of carrying the population through ...”

“... macabre. A more recent column shows Marquez feeding not only books but live authors to Castro: he took Graham Greene with him to Havana to meet with the Comandante. In his latest collection of dim-witticisms, Marquez gives rave notices to the spectacle of a tyrant posing for writers as frequently as Napoleon sat for painters: all laurels and a branch of green ...”

“... courtiers after his empire had been overthrown) now that it seems unlikely that those interviews took place as he described them? To Domosławski, as a young Polish journalist writing after a decade of horrifying slander, of barrages about who did what in the Communist past, Kapuściński’s politics matter more. As a teenager growing up in a country ...”

“... L. Clemens, a deeply impressionable boy who resisted all entreaty to improve until the grave took him at 74 and closed the case. There is no point in trying to sort out fiction and reality in Hannibal-St Petersburg, or to distinguish ‘Huck’ from the real Tom, or ‘Tom’ from the real Sam. The life went into the books with such fidelity that the ...”

“... America, Moody’s major-statement novel about the nuclear family in the age of nuclear jitters, took this approach about as far as it could go. As its cover suggests, The Black Veil finds Moody reaching past his immediate literary fathers to his anguished forefathers, Hawthorne, Melville and Poe – the first example of American genius as damaged ...”

“... noble art of fostering conversation across doctrinal divides. But that isn’t the route MacIntyre took. For him, liberalism is no more than a front for capitalist individualism, seeking to reduce the complexities of human existence to a grim tug of war between ‘arbitrary choices of individuals’ and ‘collectivist control’. Meanwhile democracy ...”

“... by churning out more than a hundred romanzi rosa under the pseudonym ‘Josie Bell’, Meloni took on jobs from babysitting to working behind the bar at the Rome nightclub Piper. She studied languages at a tourism school, setting her up for her assured appearances on the international stage: perfect, impassioned Spanish when giving a speech against LGBTQ ...”

“... expected to be strictly apolitical; the independence of the judiciary is considered sacrosanct. John Rawls went to extraordinary lengths to imagine an ‘original position’ in which everyone would be capable of agreeing on the principles of social justice: in it, each of us would be ignorant of our own social status and effectively function as an outside ...”

“... had an epiphany about the way to isolate the sought-after pancreatic extract. He approached John Macleod, a biochemist at the university, who agreed to give him laboratory space to investigate his wild surmise. Banting was assisted by a student, Charles Best, and within a year they were keeping diabetic dogs alive with their extract. In 1922 Banting and ...”

“... with the employers, and they have now been joined by writers of books, who, ten years ago, took on the task, not only of convincing the Government that there should be a PLR system in this country, but also of demonstrating to the Government how to use computer and statistical science to operate it justly. In the course of doing this they discovered ...”

“... strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. It took little time for Edward Young’s fully-formed new sentence, ‘Procrastination is the thief of time’ (1742), to become tomorrow’s proverb. ‘Old soldiers never die’ (Foley, 1920) is undying. ‘The female of the species is more deadly than the ...”

“... problem worthy of note in Sierra Leone’ and the piece of being ‘poorly researched’. He took Kaplan to be saying that because more and more areas of activity, including military activity, were criminalised, there was no distinguishing political from criminal culture and it troubled him that the political origins of the war in Sierra Leone should be ...”

“... to the extra-European and post-colonial world of the 20th century. When Napoleon actually took over from the Directory, however, neither the Parisian têtes pensantes nor anybody else had much clue about this fantastic Pandora’s box. One important point of view – amusingly described by Thom – was that the Corsican chap might turn out like ...”