“... not valid under Swedish law, so his entire estate has gone to his brother and father. The estate, close to worthless at the time of his death, is now a multi-million-dollar concern. This has led, unsurprisingly, to acrimony. Larsson had been in a 32-year relationship with fellow anti-Nazi campaigner Eva Gabrielsson, but as they never married, she was not ...”

“... when I watch the more lurid of the zombie films, it seems as though I’ve come vertiginously close to seeing the Dionysiac frenzy embodied, the god torn and rent apart, and consumed by the chorus of revellers. It is crucial somehow that the victims remain conscious as they are torn to bits or chewed up; the death must be as distressing as ...”

“... day, he remembers something he didn’t actually get to see: the ground is ‘where I once missed Frank Woolley just out when I arrived having made something like 70 in half an hour’. Others send birthday greetings, only to be trumped by the recipient: ‘The day doesn’t bother me. Just another. No better no worse. But the avalanche is appalling.’ Or ...”

“... in one volume … whose mysteries not even himself could read’. The coffin, a writing surface close to death, is the only object to survive the Pequod’s wreck. It serves as a lifeboat to convey Ishmael to safety – which, given that Ishmael is our narrator, makes it a device that delivers to us the entire content of the novel. It’s a literal ...”

“... grow up sound, just as Milne himself did, according to the not unmalicious eulogy propounded by Frank Swinnerton. Milne is so far out of the literary fashion that he failed to detest his parents. His parents had previously failed to ill-treat and misunderstand him. He failed to detest his school and his schoolfellows. He married early, and his marriage ...”

“... that the Army distributed them to journalists) of ‘the swaggering Goering’. The only close similarity between the two Sharons is their inveterate mendacity. It is unlikely that the new image will convert many people – certainly not in Israel, where Sharon is widely blamed for the Lebanese disaster. Two of the country’s most distinguished ...”

“... politics will therefore turn eagerly to the essay by our leading economic theorist, Professor Frank Hahn. What does high theory have to offer the practical politician? In his preface Professor Hahn tells us that new thinking by himself and others has led him to ‘almost inevitable’ answers which ‘bear a ...”

“... at least partly attributed to their nurture. But when Burt reported intelligence test correlations close to +0.80 for his large sample of randomly-placed twins – a correlation of +1.0 would indicate a perfect resemblance – this seemed powerful evidence indeed for the great heritability of intelligence, and its relative imperviousness to environmental ...”

“... back, the noticeboard was taken down. That noticeboard is behind a poem ‘Spot the ball’ which Frank Ormsby wrote in the Seventies: We persevere from habit. When we try These days our hope’s mechanical, we trust To accident. We are selective No longer, the full hundred crosses Filling the sky. It was Craig Raine who pointed out that this is a poem ...”

“... Searle is not offering us a new argument: rather, an old one, recently revived by Thomas Nagel and Frank Jackson. There is also a standard, devastating reply to it which has been in the undergraduate textbooks for a decade. On the most obvious and reasonable interpretation, to say that John’s mental states are subjective in character is just to say that ...”

“... gain in this loss of verve, since the shimmering beauty of Barry’s imagery can sail perilously close to sheer fancifulness, even absurdity: ‘Her eyes had the green of the writing on a tram ticket,’ ‘Her legs are like the slender pillars of the courthouse in Baltinglass,’ and other such embarrassments. Barry can produce prose of great splendour, but ...”

“... he would hardly have been able to function so successfully without them. He was particularly close to President Alejandro Lanusse. Like practically everyone else, he supported the 1976 coup that ended the presidency of Isabel Peron. This was not the first coup he had supported. He was abducted next year in the common fashion by plain-clothes agents, in ...”

“... is defensive in intent (though Christopher Brasher of the Observer has sometimes come close to suggesting otherwise). It must be said that the press, and to a lesser extent television, have their problems when it comes to athletics. Not the least of the difficulties is that most discussions of running arrive fairly rapidly at the far end of what ...”

“... monetary theory got tangled with anti-semitism and began to appear in his letters, Laughlin was frank and uncompromising: I think anti-semitism is contemptible and despicable and I will not put my hand to it. I cannot tell you how it grieves me to see you taking up with it. It is vicious and mean ... Furthermore, in regard to the Cantos I will not print ...”

“... by dealers has never been so publicly available and they have never had the advantage of the very close relationship with curatorial scholarship that the staff in auction houses have enjoyed. Lacey devotes an early chapter to Charles Bell, Keeper of the Department of Fine Art at the Ashmolean Museum, who between 1920 and 1924 spent one day a week cataloguing ...”