“... all, a discussion within Calvinism, within esoteric Christianity, and within European Romanticism. John Herdman’s new study is an honest piece of work, a little bit underpowered, but with a thesis. This is that the theme of the double – a theme so dear to James Hogg, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Dostoevsky – has its origin in Christian dualism, and then becomes a ...”

“... movement. Cheyette traces the Disraelian influence on the ‘imperial Gothic’ fiction of John Buchan and, more controversially, borrows August Bebel’s phrase ‘the socialism of fools’ as a blanket term for the ideas of Shaw and Wells. Bebel’s concern was to attack the kind of socialism, typified in a British context by H.M. Hyndman, which ...”

“... me. I might be tempted to use words like ‘psychotic’, or ‘psychopath’, but your creator, John Banville, would understandably resent these catch-all categories, as restrictions on the subtlety, the complexity, the truth of his creation. If it is possible to get at the truth of this elaborately inventive tale. The elaboration is in the incidental ...”

“... Sunday Times book, Philby, the spy who betrayed a generation, which he co-authored in 1968. Mr John Costello has produced Mask of Treachery, dealing with Blunt, while Mr Robert Cecil has written a biography of his former Foreign Office colleague Donald Maclean. To round things out, we have The Storm Birds, Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s study of the Soviet ...”

“... my might.   As he slumped to the ground and fell backward, I saw I had kept my word. His nose no longer projected, his teeth were gone, and where his face had been, a bloated mask of crimson was forming before my eyes. And a hole in this was screaming ... More interesting than the refutation of the slurs is the question of how they arose. Envy might ...”

“... Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Even those, John Campbell suggests, who have little or no memory of Margaret Thatcher, live in a world she created; and from which there is no going back. More than any other British prime minister, even Gladstone, she conforms to Max Weber’s type of the modern demagogic politician: the leader who appeals directly to the electorate over the heads of the party machine; and who subordinates the machine to his or her political personality ...”

“... are a snooty woman in a children’s book. Your Malteses, your Chihuahuas. The utility breeds have no adjectives in common. During the judging, a commentator described the group as ‘hugely varied … we’ve got some very large breeds, some breeds which were bred for running and some which were bred to be eaten, unfortunately.’ There were 174 bulldogs this ...”

“... and Morgan the dark-glassed have lost part of their integrity to an extraneous attribute. They are no longer free to be just themselves. Not being free to be just themselves is what the women in Attercliffe’s life chiefly complain about. Sometimes it is men in general that they blame: ‘Women are encouraged to strike out for themselves, and all they strike ...”

“... gangsters’. Martin Scorsese’s Little Italy childhood was spent a short distance from the no-longer Points, and though the stories in Asbury’s book started a thirty-year obsession to transform The Gangs of New York into Gangs of New York, what made it to the screen reflects less the book’s lore than its pervasive atmosphere of ...”

“... what took place at Beijing airport on Monday, 21 February 1972. It’s also the opening scene of John Adams’s opera Nixon in China, premiered in Houston in 1987, and staged again at the London Coliseum over a few evenings last summer. An actual occurrence then, but also, as Adams and his librettist Alice Coleman understood, a brightly lit performance with ...”

“... undignified and unnatural circus tricks. At the end of this formidable survey of the aristocracy John Beckett notes that they have survived into the late 20th century ‘as protectors of the nation’s heritage’ and that some ‘even argue that as collectors of beautiful objects over time their families were thinking not merely of self-interest but of the ...”

“... and even humility coexisted alongside a habit of self-justification and a mania for work. ‘No time today!’ Sir Gilbert would cry as he swept out of his office to the next appointment, brushing assistants aside. There cannot have been much intimacy for the boy. Though he grew up in awe of his father, he came to nurture disagreements and perhaps ...”

“... it adversity, that such beauty does exist.’ Baraka made the observation in his liner notes to John Coltrane’s album Live at Birdland, which includes ‘Alabama’, an elegy for the four girls murdered in the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing.I thought of Baraka’s words at New York’s Riverside Church last Saturday, at the funeral of the alto saxophonist ...”

“... the Russian state, which in its organisation has changed very little since Soviet times. There are no strong independent civic institutions, and the Army, Interior Ministry and intelligence services are still obedient to the President, while he has succeeded in implementing a new constitution that increases his personal powers and enables him, more and more ...”

“... had gone from him. He became at some uncertain point the patient – the Roussel money talking, no doubt – of the top man in Paris for mind disorders, Pierre Janet, and crops up under a pseudonym as a case-study in Janet’s book, From Anguish to Ecstasy. ‘A shy, scrupulous, neuropathic young man, easily depressed’, Janet sums up his patient, whom he ...”