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“... success. In The Face of the Deep, Rossetti’s line-by-line commentary on the Apocalypse, her reading of Revelation 18, in which the merchants cry ‘Alas’ to fallen Babylon, puts her in mind of fallen England:Alas any whom the unknown day and hour find unprepared! From the folly of the foolish virgins, Good Lord, deliver us. And looking around us ...”

“... was a product of a flawed and abridged translation is false. Indeed, the opposite is the case: a reading of the full text, far from resolving or dissolving the difficulties, seems only to confirm them, and historians are unlikely to prove any less carping in the future. Its historical shortcomings are patent, but it should not be forgotten that when Foucault ...”

“... to plug the gap it left behind.’ At the end of 1918 Teffi thought it prudent to embark on a reading tour of Kiev and Odessa, still both held by the Whites. She took two evening gowns and a bottle of perfume, thinking she would be back within a month, once things had settled down. At the frontier she and her group of writers and actors were held up in a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... two camps could agree on was that the Americans were hopelessly wrong in conflating their work. Reading through the collections that these adversaries have produced almost 20 years later, I was filled with nostalgia for the slanging matches of those days. Now, all is comity and mutual appreciation. Then, Vernon and Joyce accused Lawrence and Taylor of ...”

“... organisation, possibly founded by Churchill during World War Two? What did Deza’s mentor, Sir Peter Wheeler (modelled on the Oxford professor Sir Peter Russell), do during the Spanish Civil War? And what about the bloodstain on his stairs? What is being set up by the narrator’s constant outing of ‘bogus ...”

“... 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. ...”