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“... The Nature of Space and Time contains six lectures-three by Stephen Hawking, three by Roger Penrose – and a closing Hawking-Penrose debate. As Penrose indicates, it might be viewed as continuing the famous Bohr-Einstein exchange of some seventy years ago. Against the background of new cosmological theories, Hawking defends Bohr’s thesis that quantum theory has no radical incompleteness ...”

“... to public policy. He had done exactly this in a number of cases involving oppressive loans or sharp transactions. Instead, accepting that slaves were insurable cargo, he washed his hands of the moral issues by ordering a retrial to investigate whether it had really been necessary to throw them overboard. The case is as bad a blot as any on the law of ...”

“... to free and equal self-creation, accepting of democracy and welfare’. It’s only by making a sharp distinction between earlier and later liberalisms that Moyn is able to argue that ‘Cold War liberalism was a betrayal of liberalism itself’ and that it ‘broke with the liberalism it inherited’.Yet this pivotal chronological distinction dissolves in ...”

“... by birth – are sealed off from the many intractable problems of everyday Soviet life, which, Stephen Cohen maintains in his interesting volume of essays, put one in mind of a Third World state rather than a modern super-power. ‘My father lives in the skies,’ Gromyko’s daughter once told Shevchenko. ‘For twenty-five years he has not set foot on ...”

“... swordwork of a devastating sort as well. It is not so long ago, indeed, that I experienced a sharp regret that John Carey’s unstinted praise of work that I had done had also provided the occasion for his fierce underestimation of work by a friend and countryman of mine. Still, it is inevitable that this kind of complication enter into the relations ...”

“... characterisation in negative qualities: the selfishness of Rosamund Vincy, the priggishness of Stephen Dedalus. Woloch looks at the question of how living persons get ‘rendered into literary form’ from an interesting angle. How do novels use, and make us accept, differences between major and minor characters? How do narratives make their protagonists ...”

“... of new work which lay outside any of the literary beginnings with which they were familiar. It was sharp, colourful and often political.’ Well, very likely a tiny percentage of it actually was ‘sharp’ and ‘colourful’, whilst in the nature of things most of it must have been terrible tripe. It is a misplaced zeal ...”

“... in the engagement, or ‘troth-plighting’, of their daughter Mary to one of their apprentices, Stephen Belott. Some years later Belott sued Mountjoy for an unpaid dowry of £60, and Shakespeare was among those called to give evidence at the Court of Requests in Westminster. He did so on 11 May 1612, though – somewhat conveniently for Mountjoy – he ...”

“... can cut it on the platform? The two most successful conservative leaders of the Western world – Stephen Harper in Canada and Angela Merkel in Germany – are notoriously uninspiring performers behind the lectern. A recent New Yorker profile of Merkel described her delivery as so toneless it seemed as if ‘she were trying to induce her audience into ...”

“... occasions when Mitford and Waugh met in the flesh they were apt to quarrel, thanks to her sharp tongue and his bad temper. Charlotte Mosley, who married Mitford’s nephew, is a sharp-eyed editor who knows a thing or two (as, for instance, that une tante intégrale is a raging queen). She has already edited a volume ...”

“... people like me directing films, I would do anything. Working with Karel was special. Just so nice. Stephen Frears (film director): In 1965, I was working at the Royal Court in London, which was a bit like being on call to the Borgias, a place full of brilliant and terrifying men. Then Karel came to direct a play by the Italian playwright Franco Brusati. His ...”

“... but also because his nature, therefore his language, was such an unwonted blend of needle-sharp naturalism and the wooziest poetic suggestiveness. Certainly, never was a revolt – and this novel, like all his work, is the chronicle and commentary of a Miltonic revolt – expressed so tenderly. Indeed, at times one fears that he is going to break into ...”

“... pretty quickly on the reader of Borges’s collected sonnets, and even creeps up in the course of Stephen Kessler’s introduction to the volume. Here we learn first that Borges the poet is ‘quite a different writer from the one we thought we knew’; then that he is ‘earnest’ in his poems and ‘less ironic’ than in his fiction; that he is ‘a ...”

“... believe these are serious questions, requiring patient and scholarly rebuttal? Afrocentrism, says Stephen Howe, comes in two varieties. The first is an interest in Africa and its culture reinforced by the belief ‘that Eurocentric bias has blocked or distorted knowledge of Africans and their cultures’. Although it has been around for some time, it has been ...”

“... for taxis, I was a convenient escort for Helene at embassies or in the Alexander Platz. My first sharp political lesson came in the course of my term with a Jewish publisher. I found him in tears one morning just after Hitler had taken over: he had had all his books seized – an experience that was to keep me on the left ever since. Soon after my return to ...”