“... 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 ...”

“... that readers in different cities and countries could read a printed page and know that they were reading the same thing as everyone else. Gutenberg lost his monopoly on typographic printing in 1454 and his technology soon spread, adopted in the 1470s in Venice, Paris, Lyon, Kraków, Buda and London, and by ‘hundreds of printers across several ...”

“... was not until he’d spent more than a decade at the top of politics that he became an MP, so that reading his autobiography, Speaking Out: Lessons in Life and Politics (Hutchinson, £20), one has the strange impression of his career slowing down at exactly the point you’d expect it to get started, as he leaves behind the international summits and the dramas ...”

“... to the performance – a performance that lives only, of at least most intensely, in a first reading. Go back over the text and much of it seems to have melted into a series of repetitive rhetorical gestures that are all dead letter, not living spirit. This is Hazlitt’s point in a little-noticed passage in an essay called ‘Whether genius is conscious ...”

“... at least of the standard questions astrologers answered less pressing. On the other hand, there is Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science (1958), which stresses that Evans-Pritchard had given an account of a coherent, self-sustaining way of making sense of the world, one which ensured that belief in oracles would seem rational. These two interpretations ...”

“... noted that the contents of the book were all products of a three-year period, and then went on: ‘Reading them as they appeared, one became aware of Professor Kermode as the most interesting reviewer to emerge for a long time.’ The reviews had been published in a variety of periodicals, including the Listener, Partisan Review and the London Magazine, but ...”

“... On how books – good books – work, Inglis is bold and clear. He recalls his child self reading ‘The Tree of Justice’ in Rewards and Fairies, the old madman brought before King William by Rahere the Jester revealed as Harold Godwin, and Hugh, the Saxon knight, kneeling to him. And ‘each time,’ writes Inglis, ‘the queer, crisp ripple of ...”

“... sickly. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations A book about the delights and healing effects of reading, recalling the novels about precocious readers and intellectual explorers that many of us grew up with, South Pacific cousin to Anne of Green Gables, Little Women and innumerable similar childhood favourites: this is the last place one would expect to ...”

“... Peter​ Thiel is known for so many different things it can be hard to keep up. He co-founded PayPal, which provided the basis for his early fortune as well as Elon Musk’s. He is the eerily prescient angel investor who helped launch Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook on the path to global domination. He is the man who bankrupted Gawker, the online gossip site, by funding Hulk Hogan’s libel action, fulfilling a decade-long vendetta that started after Gawker outed Thiel as gay ...”

“... The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (1981). That masterpiece is a touchstone for Peter Rose, who like de Ste Croix insists that the formation of the state apparatus in the early Greek polis and the widespread rise of tyrants in the late Archaic period make little sense without reference to conflicts between classes. As he sees it, the ...”

“... dismiss the notion of civil defence against nuclear attack as absurd. Twenty years ago or more, Peter Cook in Beyond the Fringe made a delicious mockery of the notion that you should get into a paper bag in order to protect yourself against nuclear fall-out, and the Government’s recent pamphlet, ‘Protect and Survive’, caused both protest and ...”

“... skull had subsequently been buried with the rest of Browne’s body in the Norwich church of St Peter Mancroft. There follows a disquisition on the life and work of Sir Thomas, a man close to Sebald’s heart, and his nearest precursor in cast of mind, lightly (if arcanely) learned and enormously curious, including the possibility or probability of his ...”

“... may have been copying from a written, perhaps Persian, source. One wonders about Marco’s slave, Peter the Tartar, alias Petrus Suliman. The Mongol conquests resulted in a wholesale reduction to slavery or worse for much of the literate educated elite of Asia, and ghosting for an Italian entrepreneur with good media connections would probably have been a ...”