“... character is also the only senior British politician who benefited directly from the crisis. Hugh Thomas, in The Suez Affair (1967), describes the behaviour of Eden’s chancellor, Harold Macmillan, as that of someone who derived ‘an almost aesthetic satisfaction from danger and risks’. It was Macmillan who did most to persuade Eden that an Anglo-French ...”

“... a kind elder sister. Something of this feeling always remained; and even in the maturity of her powers, and in the enjoyment of increasing success, she would still speak of Cassandra as of one wiser and better than herself. In childhood, when the elder was sent to the school of a Mrs Latournelle in the Forbury at Reading, the younger went with her, not ...”

“... of a science fictional question. Philip K. Dick, indeed, posited a future world in which the Axis powers had won World War Two, and proceeded to divide the United States down the middle into two zones with two decidedly different regimes of military occupation. In Fire on the Mountain Terry Bissell posits a world in which a successful John Brown’s raid sets ...”

“... financial crisis, grapples with some of the complexities of the Calman Commission on extending the powers of the Scottish Parliament, and hosts a strategy session on the forthcoming local and European elections. Before he goes to bed, his speechwriter Kirsty McNeill sends him a copy of a poem to perk him up. It pays tribute to the American baseball star Ted ...”

“... by ‘the (Aldous) Huxleys’. She chauffeured a large black poodle across America for the (Thomas) Manns; she drank cocktails in Paris with Jane Bowles and Martha Gellhorn; in Grasse and California she cooked and ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first ...”

“... must be secular and modern. Thus he pronounces Arias a ‘confident man sure of his professional powers, worldly knowledge and career: a Spanish renaissance man tracing the horizon of modernity’. But what if Yovel is wrong in his classifications of Catholic and Jewish? Medieval and early modern Catholics were not slavish in their devotions. They kept track ...”

“... to pay his legal costs when he was sued by the incurably litigious Lord Alfred Douglas. Edward Thomas was devoted to him. John Masefield drank claret with him at teatime as they sang sea shanties together in Ransome’s mother’s kitchen. And Ransome took to most people; he was not choosy. In fact, he was inclined to instant and lasting hero worship from ...”

“... of retellings: one mythographer has an immortal Helen marry Achilles in the Underworld, while Thomas Heywood describes her killing herself for her sad grey hairs. Maguire has kept her survey within bounds by setting aside the political uses of Helen of Troy, even though these flourished in the Elizabethan period; she has also set aside the dramatic or ...”

“... to try to smooth things over, and has promised moderately enhanced tax-raising and spending powers for Scotland, but they are unlikely to be enough. Something else will have to give. What will it be? One obvious possibility is the electoral system itself. I said that the United Kingdom is currently more or less ungovernable, but really it’s only ...”

“... have intensified with the coming of digital and cybernetic technologies and their extraordinary powers of reproduction and animation; animators keep refining their techniques in order to conceal their use. The author of The Erotic Doll must be cursing his bad luck that he finished his book before the current show at the Hayward Gallery, The Human Factor ...”

“... a creation of the later Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, and like them it had almost magical powers. Antiquarians claimed they could speak to the dead; magi claimed they could call them back to life; and indexes genuinely showed the reader where to find exemplary figures doing great things, as well as what they had said and written on any given ...”

“... a way out of terminal ennui.The saints and their wild doings, the angels and their extraordinary powers, now mischievously recorded by Eliot Weinberger, may have helped enliven the days assigned to them. The strangeness of such religious material again and again makes it incomprehensible that such figures should be considered holy, but if you look instead at ...”

“... in Proust. But something else was bubbling, his own eros, and success came to be measured by his powers of seduction as well as his academic prowess. Dustan kept on cruising men (and dating women) even after enrolling at the elite École Nationale d’Administration in 1988: ‘I didn’t want to blow my chances. I was made to succeed. To have a beautiful ...”

“... No American novelist​ has devoted as much energy as Percival Everett to the proper noun, its powers as engine, instrument and index. Towards the end of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (first published in 2013), a story about storytelling in which nobody is called Percival Everett or Virgil Russell, one of the narrators gives a list of 516 gerunds that encompass the whole of human activity ...”

“... position as the Government Critic, ‘the head of the literary police’. While not exercising the powers of Count Benkendorf in Russia, who was to control and paternalise the genius of Pushkin, Gifford and others like him were indeed powerful agents for the forces of reaction; and they were hypocrites too, because they never admitted what Hazlitt rightly ...”