“... causing it to lose any of the immediacy and gaiety which makes it an ephemeral form. When Earthly Powers was passed over for the Booker Prize in favour of the first volume of William Golding’s seafaring trilogy, the choice was between a ‘serious’ work, which time may or may not agree to be a masterpiece, and a light novel on a heroic scale, which seems ...”

“... that although, for the first time in the history of the modern nation-state, the world’s major powers are not engaged in direct geopolitical and military rivalry, but solely in economic rivalry, ‘the United States has striven to become the most overwhelmingly dominant military power the world has ever seen.’ The presiding asymmetry of the present ...”

“... his children and his court, and on the period after 1530; diplomacy and war with the Continental powers have provided the broader setting. Scotland’s role is confined to the soap opera of Mary Queen of Scots and her more significant but much less glamorous son, James VI. Fatal Rivalry: Flodden 1513 provides a welcome antidote to the usual run of work on ...”

“... for great wars. They will not say: when the woman walked into the room But rather: when the great powers united against the workers. But they will not say: the times were dark But rather: why were their poets silent?There is something clunky and too correct about the party line here – the house painter was far more ecumenical in his trampling – but the ...”

“... by Denys Hay is taken), and in 1969 Angus Calder published The People’s War. In the meantime, Michael Howard and Brian Bond, at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, widened the dimensions of the military history taught there. In 1970 the ‘Fontana History of War and Society’ was launched (‘society’ meaning British or English ...”

“... I retreated to my thoughts.I felt sure that I had made Vikram Seth appear by thinking about him. Michael Holme, the narrator of An Equal Music, makes the love of his life appear by thinking about her. He’s sitting on a bus in Oxford Street when another bus draws alongside, and there she is: Julia McNicholl, or Julia Hansen as she now is, though ...”

“... to other forms of chess: and that is all. It would surely have been of interest to describe the powers of the Cannon, which introduces a radically new idea into chess: it has the same move as our Rook, but can capture only by leaping over one intervening piece (and can leap only when making a capture), giving check in the same manner. Japanese chess ...”

“... pretty obscure. To credit the intuitive writer, as Redgrove seems to, with intuitive physical powers seems both sentimental and negative. It is as though a poet were no more than a dowser or clairvoyant manqué. Guy claims that ‘we scatter our seed, and the Queens are fertilised’ – but what does the claim mean? Who are the Queens? What is involved ...”

“... is only when you feel that you are not devoted that you are devoted.’ Not the least of the powers of My Guru and his Disciple is its opposition to the thing that all America now seems to want: rebirth. The dreadful desire to go through it all again is the reverse of the Eastern promise and purpose, which give Isherwood’s books a distinct ...”

“... Act and praised the unelected and deeply corrupt Corporation. It possessed, he noted, the ‘full powers’ of local self-government, and had succeeded in ‘securing to every one of its citizens all the rights, and imposing all the obligations, of men free and equal before their fellow-men and before the law’. Toulmin Smith prevailed. In a fudge that ...”

“... a hair’s breadth of becoming deputy leader of the Party. Opinions differ, but a Party led by Michael Foot and Benn would probably have seen a mass defection of MPs to the SDP. As it was, Benn’s failure paved the way for Neil Kinnock’s purge of the Militant Left, as well as the crucial policy switch from renationalisation of key industries to ...”

“... gangs as once I watched the criminal world of London.’ These few lines supply the background to Michael Chabon’s novella, which begins thirty years later on the South Downs. The main character is an ‘old man’, once a famous detective, now devoted to his bees. He remains unnamed throughout, but given that he wears an Inverness cape and hunting cap, and ...”

“... keeps a form of life going where everything else seems dead. There are also the telekinetic powers of their daughter, but we’ll return to those. The room is in the Zone, a post-industrial space of the kind we’ve just seen, which has been depopulated by a meteorite (or perhaps by an even more mysterious cause) and is the location of such strange ...”

“... The title​ of Michael Moorcock’s novel Byzantium Endures, published in 1981, captures with one verb the conventional picture of a whole civilisation. Byzantium’s antiquity and grandeur are timeless and static – Yeats’s ‘monuments of unaging intellect’. The future lies elsewhere, in the rise of a West from which Byzantium is excluded ...”

“... out by drones. And despite having written academic papers backing a powerful and restrictive War Powers Act, he made the legal case for the Obama administration’s right to make war on Libya without bothering to get congressional approval. Koh, who has now returned to teaching human rights law, is not the only human rights advocate to call for the use of ...”