“... Most​ writers of fiction are interested in anonymity. If they aren’t tickled by the thought when they sit down to write their first books, they get to that point after the first couple have come out. Writing is solitary, private, inward, and involves something close to complete control; even when there are losses of control or agency, they’re of the sort that a writer has, most of the time, chosen for herself ...”

“... The modern mode​ of watching television, largely uncoupled from broadcast schedules, makes a programme’s transition from critical acclaim to audience approval to mass adoption more gradual than it used to be. Once, there were immediate hits and misses. There still are – but it’s more common for the hits to build gradually, by word of mouth. Many shows seem magically to become more famous in between series than when they are actually on the air ...”

“... jargon. Krotkov was also an author who wrote several anti-American plays including one called John, Soldier of Peace, based on the life of Paul Robeson. While Pasternak worked, this strangely-assorted group would sit up smoking and playing till dawn. Hingley is detached, dry, basically unforthcoming: de Mallac enters into the legend with warmth and ...”

“... the Troubles, or Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie’s version of the Antigone in an Islamist setting, or John Kinsella’s new update of Samson Agonistes. As it happens​ , Halpern’s insights can unlock much in those works. His account of Samson Agonistes, for example, goes a long way towards explaining what impelled Kinsella to ‘redramatise’ the tragedy. He ...”

“... another party if it is to be more than assent. It happens within the heart (according to King John) but becomes consent only when it is declared. The word could mean, as now, agreement to a proposal, but Shakespeare’s plays reflect social conditions in which consent between lovers depends on the consent given by friends and family. As Petruchio tells ...”

“... rationalist, anti-clerical and republican, showing more affinity with the Co. Derry freethinker John Toland (1670-1722) than with such rosary-bead nationalists as Pádraic Pearse. After Toland, the figure that mattered most to him, historically at least, was Wolfe Tone. The rising of the United Irishmen in 1798 has long been important for republicans ...”

“... At the time of his death in July of last year, C.P. Snow was working on this book. Its theme is the two-faced gift of physics and its applications, and of those who in not much over a generation have changed our world. Although he had completed only a first draft, his publishers have done well to let us have the book, for it is Snow at his best. In his fiction, particularly in the Strangers and Brothers sequence of novels, he charted the social changes of half a century ...”

“... In the world​ of money, there is always an Official Worry List, containing the next big things which are likely to go wrong or blow up. The items on the list are sometimes problems we’ve all heard of, with obvious political and human ramifications, such as the Ukraine crisis, or the rise of Isis. The macro-economic take on both of these has less to do with widespread suffering and death, and more to do with accurately pricing energy risks ...”

“... Got a headache?​ Help is at hand. At your local pharmacy or supermarket or corner shop or garage or indeed pretty much anywhere, you can buy a branded packet of 2-(4-isobutylphenyl)propionic acid, better known as ibuprofen, at a cost of £2 for 12 200mg tablets. (If that pharmacy is a Boots, you’re buying the medicine from the people who created it, since it was Boots’s research arm which came up with ibuprofen in the first place ...”

“... it to be a direct communication from the front. The hitherto most-applauded novel of Vietnam, John Del Vecchio’s The Thirteenth Valley (1982), was written by a former member of the 101st Airborne division whose publishers made much of the fact that their author had won a Bronze Star ‘for heroism in Ground Combat’. It is another understood thing ...”

“... A recent interview I had with the chairman of the Russian Central Bank exemplifies the dangerously tense atmosphere within which the politics of the Soviet Union have been conducted since the August putsch – and underscores the importance of what Arkady Vaksberg writes in his uneven, irritating but critically important book. What Georgy Matiukhin wanted to say was that a large part of the developing business culture of the Soviet Union was criminal ...”

“... led Shaftesbury to seek out the spectacle of religious inspiration. On 5 July 1707, he watched as John Lacy, a well-to-do Presbyterian gentleman, spoke in tongues before a London audience of interested observers and fellow members of Lacy’s own Protestant sect: the French Prophets. This millenarian group, founded by Camisard refugees escaping persecution in ...”

“... of Spender. As Worsley puts it, in his 1971 preface, Murray ‘was for us what someone like John Osborne was to the young of the Fifties’. But an Osborne without anger or malice. As Worsley presents him, the Spender character is the St Sebastian of his time: ‘what was most striking about Martin was his long, thin, sensitive, suffering face. The ...”

“... pronouncements transcend comment. On the steps of Turin cathedral on 13 April of this year. Pope John Paul concluded a morose diatribe on the emptiness and malignity of modern capitalist society with a ringing proclamation: ‘But there is Christ and he is sufficient for all time.’ Three centuries or so earlier, Blaise Pascal summarised the theme of his ...”

“... Yet there is something in the book which seems to capture more of the essence of the man than John Morrison’s much more balanced biography, published last year. Yeltsin is clearly a more ‘natural man’ than the garrulous, self-regarding Gorbachev. Though incurably populist and rough of tongue, he has also, so far, stood behind reform in the ...”