“... Donny, the mother, a role she plays with frazzled charm and confident understatement, and the boy, John, aged about twelve, is Danny Worters, whose age is not in the programme, but who manages to sound like a worried prodigy without sounding like a pain. Izzard is a bit lost between these two, trying to be laid-back but only managing to seem out of it, and ...”

“... stiff competition. Levi in his bibliography does not bother to mention studies by Peter Quennell, John Lehmann, Joanna Richardson and Susan Chitty, among others. He does, however, pay his warm respects to Vivien Noakes’s definitive Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (1968, reissued 1985). Noakes has reviewed Levi’s book – ‘a joyous ...”

“... Council of Churches, intelligence and counter-intelligence, and such German experts in Britain as John Wheeler Bennett. But it is questionable whether this tissue of unsubstantiated promises – comprised as it was of many, often contradictory, fugitive contacts, indirect reports and indiscreet conversations – really amounts to a model of international ...”

“... terms, was the position of a tiny minority. His bibliography notably fails to include John Gillingham’s harsh, though solidly documented, indictment of the Galopin Committee – another unwelcome memory in Belgium. The collaborationists – as distinct from the collaborateurs d’ état – began to seem more useful to the occupation authorities ...”

“... One of the most intriguing and in some ways bewildering aspects of the Hebrew language is that it has managed to stay in continuous literary use for over three thousand years; roughly the same length of time as Chinese and Sanskrit, the two other major ancient literary languages that are still in written use. The most dramatic changes that have occurred over the centuries have been the emergence of rabbinic Hebrew from Biblical Hebrew towards the end of the pre-Christian era; the complex encounter of Hebrew with Arabic poetry and philosophy beginning in the tenth century; and the early 20th-century revival of Hebrew as a vernacular in the new Zionist settlements, itself preceded – and made possible – by the revival in Enlightenment Europe of Hebrew as a secular literary language ...”

“... of its precursor is not altogether to the novel’s advantage. The revelations are made by John James Todd, a forgotten film-director in Mediterranean exile putting his memories in order. These are varied enough: born in Edinburgh in 1899, Todd proves largely ineducable but has a talent for mathematics and holding a camera. He endures an unsympathetic ...”

“... troops, Synghman Rhee’s openly-proclaimed ambitions and the coincidental presence of the hawkish John Foster Dulles in Seoul have been cited in evidence, but none of the works under review provides any substantiation for this interpretation. The scale and weight of the North Korean attack speaks for itself. And as Max Hastings properly reminds us, the United ...”

“... him to be disturbed by conflicting allegiances in a way which is not foreign to readers of, say, John le Carré’s stories. Picking up such parallels is one pleasure. A deeper reason for the effectiveness of the books is the escape they offer from present anxiety into past discomfort. When Aubrey sets sail for the East Indies with the British envoy, Edward ...”

“... so is familiar with the ‘Blue Hotel’, the police headquarters in Johannesburg otherwise called John Vorster Square. And then a black man fell out of the sky. He came flying through a fifth floor window, landed at our feet in a spray of glass, and lay there like an upturned tortoise, feebly waving his arms in the air. I ran over and knelt beside him, but I ...”

“... allowed itself to be used to provide publicity for Sothebys, who staged a preview there of Elton John’s collection of bric-à-brac; for the Sock Shop and for Burberrys. ‘We,’ Lord Armstrong told the Lords in defence of these arrangements, ‘are the National Museum of contemporary design. We take pride in having artefacts of contemporary design in ...”

“... of food riots, particularly the well-documented one at Maldon in Essex in 1628, of which John Walter has written a fine account, would surely have cast doubt on this assumption, which in any case neglects the elements of ritual inversion which are so central both to the acceptance of female leadership and to the adoption of female disguises. There ...”

“... Aron’s intellectual heirs has led few of them to adopt the language of Mill, let alone that of John Rawls. Many have turned instead to the work of the anthropologist Louis Dumont, the great specialist of India now retired from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. Dumont was a student of Marcel Mauss and a contemporary of Lévi-Strauss who was virtually unknown to ...”

“... I have come across’. One of Hudson’s biggest all-time thrills was being spoken to by Elton John. How can a man who has been thus honoured take orders from a joyless frump like Dave Sexton? As Hudson remembers it, the brightest soccer talents of his day – Alan Hudson, Stan Bowles, Tony Currie, Charlie George – were systematically sidelined by ...”

“... Froulish’s projected stuck-in-a-lift novel. A lugubriously entertaining secondary character in John Wain’s wonderful picaresque fiction, Hurry on Down (1953), Froulish went on to present his restive audience with the main topics of his austerely untitled novel, including hunger, thirst, boredom and thoughts of suicide, as well as the quest for the ...”

“... exaggerated theories of ‘recovered memory’ syndrome. The same institution harbours Professor John Mack, who believes that beings from outer space are abducting men and women and conducting fertility experiments on them. As Showalter observes, ‘to Mack, looking for material evidence is a logical error, typical of the material bias of Western ...”