“... biographer, says his subject is ‘a man of perfect charm and fascination. A monster, in short.’ Not unlike the novel’s author. ‘I suspect Cromwell was right,’ Vice President Burr tells Schuyler, ‘the man who does not know where he is going goes farthest. Talleyrand used to tell me that for the great man all is accident. Obviously, he was ...”

“... science and philosophy of mind at several universities and has also written successful novels and short stories, including The Mind-Body Problem and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics. What she does very well is to provide a vivid biographical picture of Gödel, beginning midstream with his touching relationship with Einstein ...”

“... in (and around) 1614 by poets and historians, an anxiety given focus by the breakdown of the short-lived Parliament that was called in the spring and by the imprisonment of the Crown’s principal critics within it. The lecture by Conrad Russell, the dominant historian of the politics of the period, found no place for such sentiments. To him the ...”

“... and inquisitions and forced Catholicism.’ He had been derisive about and fearful of the short-lived first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924, when there was ‘no quadrille d’honneur’ at the Court Ball – ‘probably it was feared the socialist ministers and their wives would be too clumsy.’ Those ministers were let off wearing ...”

“... The first half of the concert consists of several items of serious music, each usually fairly short, and sometimes includes the first performance of a newly commissioned piece. But during the second half, which is televised live on BBC1 and also watched and listened to by a global audience of millions, the mood of the evening lightens considerably, as ...”

“... This was 1938. He’d been working and living in Scotland, got married, then got a job. He was on short-term contracts when the war came. He moved to King’s Lynn and had some job to do with airfield runways – which there were a lot of in East Anglia. He was also in the Royal Observer Corps. Well, he’d have been then about forty. He was born in 1900. I ...”

“... Wallace also started work on a new ‘long thing’, and in his lifetime published two extracts as short stories: ‘Good People’ in the New Yorker (2007) and ‘The Compliance Branch’ in Harper’s (2008). Since his death, there have been more bits in the New Yorker, and an archive of papers sold to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. And ...”

“... and influence is sought in a periodic ballyhooing of the ‘trans-Atlantic alliance’, as in Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent (2008), which Niall Ferguson in an enthusiastic review claimed will ‘be read with pleasure by men of a certain age, class and education from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to London’s West End’. Ferguson himself is homo ...”

“... forty-plus books to his name (matching Theroux’s own tally), who narrates. Family life isn’t short of critics in literature, but it’s hard to think of a novel to match this one, where bitterness comes to seem an end in itself. The Way of All Flesh was certainly an act of revenge on Samuel Butler’s part (prudently delayed until after his death), but ...”

“... Marshall and was excited by Hayek’s lectures and those of the brilliant Abba Lerner. But it was Philip Barrett Whale, who worked on international trade, who prompted Hirschman’s first paper and wrote him a reference for a professional life. So far, one might say, still not so unusual in the circumstances of the time. What particularly affected Hirschman ...”

“... nature of literary truth. That’s the excuse, anyway. For a while in the 1980s it looked as if Philip Roth would never recover from this syndrome, this affliction of the desk-bound and lionised, and J.M. Coetzee too showed signs of becoming a chronic case. Now Michael Chabon has produced Moonglow, supposedly based on conversations from 1989 between a ...”

“... Alma Mahler, the novelist Hermann Broch, whose essay, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, is the best short evocation of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna there is, and his mistress, the wife of the art-historian Meier-Graefe. There was a host of minor literary and artistic figures of the Weimar era. The Frankfurt School, in exile, established itself at West 117th ...”

“... the finest poem he has written, is as hard a nut to crack as many an Empson poem, though it stops short of both the bafflement and authority of ‘Bacchus’. His affection for the language of science, and even more for the world of applied science, is Empsonian. The James who stated that the modern equivalent of a Donatello statue is not something by Henry ...”

“... little art’, was commissioned. Her engaging memoir unfolds in unnumbered, untitled, unstructured short chapters: a pillow book on the translator’s love affair with words and writers, it ventriloquises Barthes’s late style of ‘biographical nebulae’, which aimed ‘to put a little bit of “psychological” affectivity back into intellectual ...”

“... not even in Mississippi or South Carolina, where they constituted a majority of voters. But for a short period they wielded sufficient power in substantial parts of the South to insist on the establishment of public education, laws relatively favourable to workers, debtors and tenants, and prohibitions against various sorts of racial ...”