“... I recently discovered that Aigas House is now home to the nature writer and rewilding advocate Sir John Lister-Kaye, who has restored the building to its Scots baronial glory. Aigas is now a field centre, an ecotourism business and the site of two experimental programmes: a Beaver Demonstration Project and a captive Wildcat Conservation Breeding ...”

“... peach.Specktor appreciates Rosenfeld – he sees how well she did with the far-fetched parable of John Cheever’s short story ‘The Swimmer’, with Burt Lancaster as a burned-out Wasp crawling his way across the backyard swimming pools of rural Connecticut (the athletic Burt could not swim) – but he is entranced by the elusive Carole Eastman, who is ...”

“... been the military governor of the West Bank city of Jericho. In the late 1970s, as their careers took off, both men left Israel for North America – Kahneman went to the University of British Columbia and Tversky to Stanford. Tversky was the first to become famous for the work they’d done together, and the tensions caused by this damaged their ...”

“... ending in time to run it off on Thursday morning. This is the world Wenger inherited when he took over as Arsenal manager. After the announcement in August 1996, the headline on the back page of the Daily Mirror ran: ‘Arsène Who?’ In his new autobiography, Wenger describes his first match as manager: ‘On 12 October 1996, I was no longer in the ...”

“... 1954) but on its ability to tell complex stories – its contributors included William Faulkner, John Updike, Jack Kerouac and Don DeLillo. In Blood in the Garden, Herring is firmly in narrative mode, and he wants to remind us what a good narrative sport basketball is.This is true for several reasons, some more interesting than others. First, the obvious ...”

“... can, into fantasy. He has some sympathy with the familiar constipation-theory, made so much of in John Osborne’s chronicle-play. ‘Luther’s scatology-permeated language has to be taken seriously as an expression of the painful battle fought body and soul against the Adversary.’ It may be worthwhile to recall that shit is nearly as plentiful in Marx’s ...”

“... here, in more senses than one, that the author’s problems begin. The Macmillan family apparently took against the book that he was writing and has withheld or withdrawn permission for him to quote from copyright material over which it has control. The present Earl of Stockton is quoted as calling the author’s technique ‘psycho-history’, which ...”

“... discontent back into a wide-ranging critique of the received version of the past. Initially this took the form of a patricidal assault on the radical nationalists who were arraigned for their mythologisation of the convicts as defiant victims, the bushrangers as primitive rebels and goldfield diggers as levelling democrats. The re-evaluation widened as ...”

“... prestige rested. No wonder he was looked on as a threat to vested interests by his colleagues. It took a long time for the French to be impressed by his masterpiece on the Mediterranean. He published it at his own expense; it remained out of print for many years. Only when an English translation appeared, and was greeted enthusiastically abroad, did the ...”

“... The action spans fifteen years, from the end of the Depression to the advent of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Vidal keeps track of the major political developments but concentrates on the inter-generational conflicts between Burden and Blaise and their respective children. From time to time a famous politician appears in the middle distance – we ...”

“... changing rapidly and competition for housing was intense, serious inter-racial hostility mainly took the form of what Pilkington calls the ‘white riot’. The same thing is referred to in some of the relevant American literature as a ‘communal’ or ‘contested-area riot’ – the Chicago riot of 1919 offers one of the most spectacular ...”

“... Hillis Miller, in his book, The Disappearance of God, which was published in 1963, before Miller took his deconstructionist turn. The critical avant-garde was at that moment phenomenological, in the manner of Gaston Poulet; the critical project was to map the configurations and repetitions of an entire oeuvre, including marginal materials, journal entries ...”

“... names of bogus universities, jokes and obscenities. The author mentions the way in which designers took to applying their labels all over their garments, like graffiti gangs registering their ‘tags’, but does not speculate on why the human race has felt irresistibly drawn to providing such a miscellany of reading-matter on chest and back. Is it part of the ...”

“... without aeroplanes or electricity, to a time and a place where a trip across the Atlantic that took only five days was a projector’s fantasy. Do we regret or celebrate their passing? Do we applaud or bewail the new speed and laxity? Which is the age of innocence, then or now? The movie doesn’t attend to the passage of time in this way – it leaves ...”

“... resourceful magpie of a ship-owner who disposed of his fleet at the outbreak of World War One and took to collecting everything from Chinese pottery through armour to French Impressionists. There were reproductions of his library, dining-room and lounge. ‘Lounge’ is perhaps not quite the right word: upright uncomfortable chairs, hideous panelling, deep ...”