“... these events from the point of view of three related personae: the thoughtful Jewish New Yorker, reading the novels of Victor Serge or reconsidering the Rosenberg case; the compulsive film aficionado, intrigued by the representation of the Communist world in Soviet films, Hollywood movies and the work of the East European New Wave directors, such as Gyula ...”

“... been buried, as once upon a time monarchs used to be, in the depths of the night. 3 May. I am reading Neil MacGregor’s Shakespeare’s Restless World. It’s very good, even overcoming my (A.L. Rowse generated) prejudice against reading about Shakespeare. I hadn’t realised at Richard Griffiths’s funeral in ...”

“... read ‘Sixpenny Romances’ as a child, he loved books and hid them from stern elders who equated reading with laziness. Unlike Clare, he got money for books from stealing and used to squirrel away halfpence when he was meant to be making money for his grandmother’s bakery (‘Once I believe that I had got near two Shillings together, which I hid in the ...”

“... to be true. Valladares has quite enough to indict him for without that charge. Both Tad Szulc and Peter Bourne seem to have approached the test of writing about Castro with initial enthusiasm, and in both cases the enthusiasm seems to have flagged. Both books dwell disproportionately on Castro’s life up to his taking of power, and have disappointingly ...”

“... powering the gorgeous prescience and horror of William Gibson’s Neuromancer novels, only to peter out, pretty much, by the mid-1990s, as the dull commercial reality – the real ‘consensual hallucination’, to repurpose Gibson’s phrase – of internet shopping kicked in. There was also, after 1977, the Star Wars problem, and the visual similarity ...”

“... together. Elena was now Helen, Mummy not Mami; Papa became Daddy; the boys were still Donald and Peter, of course, but they had far fewer words at their disposal by which to express themselves. They were now British – British refugees, to be exact – not just because their identity documents said so, but because their survival depended on it. And thus ...”

“... activity. My own education in science, to the age of almost thirty, depended entirely on reading the popular works of men like Julian Huxley, Wells, Haldane, Jeans, Eddington and lnfeld. Had I not been inspired by them, I would not later have become a scientist. More than that, the ideas I got from them were profound, not superficial. The list of ...”

“... sensitivity of his own circle and the military’s unthinking bravery came to mind when reading Peter Hart’s book. Hart tells the story of the Egyptian and Sudanese campaigns – Egypt in 1882, Sudan in 1883-85 and 1896-98 – through the eyewitness accounts left by soldiers and journalists, with the aim of uncovering how they were ...”

“... In fact, many cinemagoers avoided or actively resisted German blandishments. Until Pearl Harbor, Peter Demetz remembers in his occupation memoir, Prague in Danger, cinemas in the city played American musicals, including the Broadway Melody series, to ‘packed houses’ that included the city’s many jazz-obsessed swing kids. In a novel set during the ...”

“... Loyalist operator gave the impression that he looked forward to putting down his gun. When I asked Peter Robinson of the DUP about his, he replied: ‘If I got the chance to get it out, I’d probably get quite close to my target.’ We were gazing across Robinson’s lawn at the ramparts of his garden wall. His closed circuit TV was showing a dull ...”

“... of having their knees nailed to the furniture. The fallen state of Private Eye is illustrated by Peter McKay’s foolish and ill-written book, Inside Private Eye, but scornful young readers should remember that this downmarket old fogey was once a young fogey. It stood up to the Krays, a plucky little public-school rag-mag. This brings us back to The Old ...”

“... that Keillor belongs, the tradition in which the reader really does think he is hearing – not reading an imitation of the spoken word. Keillor’s old-fashioned skills were sharpened by his long experience in another old-fashioned medium – live radio. He invented, and presented for more than a decade, a musical variety show – The Prairie Home ...”

“... common servant, but her unusual beauty and even more unusual luck brought her to the attention of Peter the Great, who made her first his mistress, then his wife, and finally his successor. She became Tsarina Catherine I, and from 1725 to 1727 she reigned as absolute monarch over an empire that already stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific. ...”

“... his stories by Harper’s. Three of his novels were filmed (one by a remarkable artist, Peter Ustinov). His plays were produced in the West End, by Tyrone Guthrie, Ustinov, Gielgud. He won medals for two of his children’s books, and the War Office commissioned books from him, as did Drambuie and Rio Tinto Zinc. His works were finally issued by ...”

“... too. His book reads like the transcript of a Royal Commission report on the occult. It is not easy reading, but the effort is worthwhile. His advice extends to such fields as politics, economics and war: this scope gives some clue both to the structure and to the theme of Stolen Lightning. This is not a book that describes magic – Paul Daniels and his ...”