“... From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity. Edvard Munch I Landfill In ways the dead are laid                           or how they come to lie I recognise myself                   insomniac                            arms angled       or crossed: children in skull caps soldiers with hobnailed boots or sandals placed like gifts beside their feet priests at the gates of death                               or afterlife their vestments stained with malt and carbon            fingers rinsed with camomile                or honeyed meadowsweet resemble me            laid sleepless by your side as if there were something else                                 some chore or rite to be completed ...”

“... What on earth, you ask, is a scarith? Well, it is a sort of mud-piecrust package, which may be tubular in shape, containing in various layers documents of immense antiquity. What language is the word from? Apparently from ancient Etruscan, or Hetruscan, if stories about the grandeur of the Tuscan kingdom up to the time of Lars Porsena of Clusium are to be believed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... These moves were not without precedent: Neil Kinnock had fought hard-left factionalism, while John Smith had abolished the union block vote. Blair was more systematic in his reforms, installing a version of democratic centralism under the guidance of Peter Mandelson. Where he diverged from his predecessors was in his objective, which was to continue ...”

“... but updating the story with the recent work of Colin Matthew, Roy Jenkins, Richard Shannon, John Vincent, Sarah Bradford and Stanley Weintraub. Essentially it’s dry-bones parliamentary history – elections, cabinets, reshuffles, bills, budgets, divisions, dissolutions – and its verdict on the falling out hardly deepens our understanding: ‘By the ...”

“... didn’t. The building was rejected by the planning inspector, but the rejection was overruled by John Prescott, then ‘first secretary of state’, on the basis that it was part of an existing ‘cluster’ of tall buildings. That wasn’t true, but the relevant authorities set about making it true in retrospect, by giving planning permission to a number of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”