“... Islamic studies was confined to a relatively small number of specialists. There is undoubtedly, as John Esposito, editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia, states in his Preface, a need for an ‘easily accessible major reference work’ in which students, journalists and political analysts can find ‘readily available and succinct information on contemporary Muslim ...”

“... were we to need reminding – that a death has meaning. ‘Tragedy, which might be noble,’ John Kerrigan remarks, ‘always, just the same, means waste’; as though some imagined economy has gone awry. Either there’s an anomaly in the system, or there’s no system. What happened at Dunblane is called a tragedy because we take it for granted that ...”

“... Pinter’s version of an occasion for whatever other interpretation is on offer, so that John Bayley’s claim that Pinter was ‘crimson with rage’ at a dinner in Oxford can be replaced by the simple truth that Pinter was just having a mild-mannered discussion about Israel. Billington doesn’t ask why ...”

“... is why Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are read all over the world while Pushkin, despite the efforts of John Fennell, Antony Wood. DM. Thomas and Vladimir Nabokov, remains primarily a writer for readers of Russian. The myriad imperfections of rendering in any translation of a novel do not seriously impede what looks like genuine literary enjoyment: we weep for Anna ...”

“... with a naturalistic account of sex and sexual pleasure that there was in France. The radical John Wilkes’s venture into sexual literature is so marginal that it doesn’t figure here at all; the conflation of liberty and libertinage in Don Giovanni’s famous aria would have fallen on uncomprehending ears. We do not quite know, as Porter and Hall point ...”

“... it is a history of coercion and control. The figure who emerges from it most strongly is John Charles McQuaid, the Archbishop of Dublin between 1940 and 1972, who stopped Noel Browne, the Minister for Health in 1951, from introducing a health scheme for mothers, thereby bringing down the Government, and who insisted that ...”

“... left – Frank was both intellectual and Communist – following similar books in memory of John Cornford, Julian Bell and David Haden-Guest, all killed in the Spanish Civil War. (The present title, Beyond the Frontier, nods towards Stansky and Abrahams’s 1966 Journey to the Frontier, a reworking of the lives of Cornford and Bell.) Immediately after ...”

“... had been at least part of the inspiration for a book by one of the editors of this volume, John Elliott: his Richelieu and Olivares (1984). For all that this volume is produced with the lavishness we have come to expect from Yale University Press, with no less than 74 illustrations, most of them portraits of 37 ‘favourites’ and of the monarchs they ...”

“... its contributors Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi (another Wisconsiner), Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, John Wheelwright, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert McAlmon, George Oppen, William Carlos Williams and Whittaker Chambers, a friend of Zukofsky’s from Columbia who, among other things, later translated Bambi from the German. Quite a diverse lot, although most of them ...”

“... by Irby, but also by Yates, Kerrigan, L.A. Murillo, Dudley Fitts, Julian Palley, Harriet de Onis, John Fein? There are also the volumes, notably The Aleph (1970) and Dr Brodie’s Report (1972), which Norman Thomas di Giovanni translated in collaboration with Borges. Well, which of these versions do you prefer? ‘I come from a vertiginous country where the ...”

“... albeit with some cyborg features, rather than taking forward what Mirowski reads as the vision of John von Neumann (mathematician, polymath, weaponeer, Cold War hawk, pioneer computer scientist, game theorist) of a fully cyborg economics, one which ‘appreciated the significance of the computer as an information processor for a reconceptualisation of the ...”

“... head was about to be struck off. ‘Where is it?’ Starkey’s account of what the martyrologist John Foxe called, in the short novel included in his Book of Martyrs, ‘the miraculous preservation of the Lady Elizabeth’, is detailed and thorough, one of the most insightful short histories of the reign of Mary, and it corrects many supposed facts and a ...”

“... Critics had some easy targets: the imbalance between their colossal earnings and their aims (John dos Passos was amused to find screenwriters putting aside tithes for the Party from their poker winnings); their tendency to confuse the studio system with the System; and, most important, their obliviousness to inconsistencies in the rigid Party line, to ...”

“... there was a preliminary investigation by the Ministry of Transport. It was carried out by Captain John Hampton, a senior nautical surveyor. He said the cause of the accident could be ascribed to three factors: Applegarth passing her tow rope at a speed which was possibly over the normal; the dropping back of the tugboat onto the liner’s bow; and the attempt ...”

“... houses could be conceived as an insidious weapon in a ruthless struggle for power. John Kerry raised the issue of climate change twice in his first election debate with Bush, despite the likely absence of any pay-off with undecided voters. Had he prevailed, he would have found allies on Capitol Hill. ...”