“... 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 ...”

“... themselves, or to priests or nurses, while the heroic surgeon sawed on. Half a century ago, John Alfred Ryle, the founder of social medicine, declared that one of the mistakes of scientific medicine was to have shelved the problem of pain. With both clinical and humane ends in mind, he called for fresh study. Since then things have indeed improved, but ...”

“... affected to some degree, and looked for an explanation. ‘She called out to the country,’ Elton John sang at the funeral. But may it not have been the English Rose’s country which, in the aftermath of loss, ceased being able to call out in a traditional way? If so, a call long responded to – not really ‘down the ages’ but for quite a long ...”

“... go wrong,’ he said by way of explanation to the equally adamant Menuhin. Gould gave way but it took a fair amount of time to persuade him to cede ‘control’ to someone else. He did the same kind of thing with the pieces and composers he played: only he knew what he was going to play, how it would sound, how fast (or slow) it would be taken. He ...”