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“... to fabricate a first bomb,’ and eight or nine kilograms for subsequent ones. According to David Albright, one of the best and most reliable independent experts, ‘the most credible worst-case estimate’ is that the North may have between 6.3 and 8.5 kg of reprocessed plutonium. In other words, the CIA’s educated guess, endlessly repeated in the ...”

“... the landmarks of Marxian economic thinking include Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1972), David Harvey’s Limits to Capital (1982), Giovanni Arrighi’s Long 20th Century (1994) and Robert Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), all expressly concerned with the grinding tectonics and punctual quakes of capitalist crisis. Yet little trace ...”

“... the artist,’ D.H. Lawrence wrote, ‘trust the tale.’ It must be his most famous aphorism – David Lodge even called it ‘a cardinal principle of modern hermeneutics’. It has proved especially popular with critics who want to deny authors the last word on their work. ‘What if a reader construes a poem in a way you felt you didn’t mean?’ an ...”

“... transformed when in Ulysses he composed a spoof list of names invited to the marriage of the grand high chief ranger of the Irish National Foresters, which includes ‘Mrs Barbara Lovebirch, Mrs Poll Ash, Mrs Holly Hazeleyes’ and other arborial frolics. As it lists and explores literary names, riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, this rich book seems ...”

“... easy about Britten’s boys. Britten certainly fell in love with Piers Dunkerley, Bobby Rothman, David Spenser and David Hemmings (the youngest of them, and the one whose relations with Britten were ‘nearly catastrophic’, according to Pears). But these were chaste relationships. Hemmings later said that ‘there was no ...”

“... the Black Dwarf.’ We had a vote, and everyone was in favour, which was rare – I think even David Mercer, who was the most grumpy attendant at these meetings. So that’s how it happened, and we raised money for a broadsheet, the first broadsheet on Mayday 1968, and people poured in with offers of help. When I think back on it, it was quite ...”

“... flourishes, and its crowning glories are the five volumes of the Poems edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins and published by Longman between 1995 and 2005. But the pleasures of scholarship are not wholly coextensive with those of reading. Students are probably still encouraged to enjoy the measured venom of the satires. But where to go beyond that? Paul ...”

“... Life! O Sun!’ Elsewhere Graves has the war inverting other myths: his version of ‘Goliath and David’ (‘For Lieut. David Thomas, 1st Batt. Royal Welch Fusiliers, killed at Fricourt, March 1916’) reverses the biblical tale of giant-killing: ‘“I’m hit! I’m killed!” young ...”

“... with mink collars and cuffs; her 18-carat-gold belt was decorated with 50 carved emeralds from David Webb, one of the finest jewellers in America; her three-acre garden brimmed with the rarest orchids in Southern California, and her kitchen produced cuisine worthy of connoisseurs. In addition to a Los Angeles mansion in affluent Holmby Hills, the ...”

“... under whose sinister influence he falls. Through all this, Froberger gradually reveals to us his grand Promethean scheme to become ‘the Magellan of the face’, to capture the spectrum of facial variations (69 of them) and penetrate to some hidden order of truth. ‘I believe that if I can catch the exact gamut of all my expressive possibilities – then I ...”

“... read too much into women’ and ‘loved his own ideas in them and never really felt grand passion’. All the same, he would have felt something. 1786 was a momentous year. In early September Goethe left secretly for Italy, sending Carl August a farewell note en route: ‘I am going in order to correct all kinds of defects and complete all kinds ...”

“... he’d junk it or record it some other time. In the Eighties, though, he began experimenting with grand studio effects, nearly always to the detriment of the song concerned. A potentially excellent album like Empire Burlesque (1985) is almost ruined by disastrous over-production that includes disco-funk synthesisers, intrusive backing singers and overdubbed ...”

“... King reports here, is the only surviving 18th-century African artefact associated with slavery. David Dabydeen has pointed out that the very word ‘patron’ could at this point mean both connoisseur and slave-owner. It would be intriguing to know whether the peculiar interest which Sloane had in tobacco and its paraphernalia was connected with his other ...”

“... natural tendency towards quietism and silence. In 1920, after a career lasting half a century, the Grand Old Man of English Letters writes to Alfred Noyes: ‘ “What a fool one must have been to write for such a public!” is the inevitable reflection at the end of one’s life.’ But there is, necessarily, more to Hardy than this, and he was always torn ...”

“... obliged to valorise his home-life and ordinary West of Scotland experience by dressing them up in grand language: the result is that his subject-matter is patronised by Literature, which bestows such poemy titles as ‘Thyestes in Ayrshire’ and ‘No Ultima Thule’. The Wee Malkies are replaced by the Visigoths, while sexual touch makes ‘pores bloom to ...”