“... a world of face-values if not of faces – yet one where by the rules of the game any face-value may have a sinister obverse, and unexpected reversals of meaning are the one thing readers know to expect. So far so good: but in this novel the Agatha Christie reference is itself only a blind. Peter is apparently suffering from loss of memory, so that to match ...”

“... concretely enough: the question is whether the modern world is seen as presenting a crisis – it may also be an opportunity – radically different from anything in past history. Hegel and Marx, of course, took this to be so, and both associated the promise, as well as the distinctive character, of modern culture with its unparalleled degree of ...”

“... World War Amery could imagine a self-sufficient Empire immune from the troubles of Europe. In May 1915 he wrote to Milner: ‘All this harping on Prussian militarism as something that must be rooted out, as itself criminal and opposed to the interests of an imaginary virtuous and pacific entity called Europe, in which we are included, is wholly ...”

“... Is it true that all celebrities ask even the hardest cartoonist for their originals? That may only mean that the bite has gone out of it all. Yet Peter Cook, one of the early impersonators, is quoted here as saying : ‘My impersonation of Macmillan was in fact extremely affectionate – I was a great Macmillan fan.’ On the printed evidence, he ...”

“... and – especially – to Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers. The risk he runs is that his novel may seem to depart from these sources only to diminish them. Such doubts – or prejudices – survive the first half of the narrative, which deals with Kepler’s relationship with Brahe and takes in earlier scenes from his life in flashback. Occasionally the ...”

“... for humane prisons than does the hard-faced Stalinism of the Labour Party and trade unions). Boyle may be truly reformed, the violence may have burned itself out, but he was a bad bastard and there are noticeable equivocations in his testament: the Gorbals is to blame for everything, loan-sharking is a public service. He is ...”

“... to deal with miscarriages of justice. It noted the criticism of the Home Office made by Sir John May, who led an inquiry into the cases of the Guildford Four and also the Maguire Seven, whose convictions were quashed in June 1991. May wrote that the Home Office’s ‘approach … was throughout reactive, it was never ...”

“... create a background of deliberate spatial confusion. A partial explanation for this development may be competitive divergence: Donatello was driven to devise original solutions by the success of the older Lorenzo Ghiberti, whose mastery of linear perspective in relief sculpture could never be surpassed. But there can be little doubt that Donatello also came ...”

“... scholars now think, what gave rise to the Scythian story? Given the absence of Pictish texts, we may never know.In addition to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Brady’s sources include two other Latin texts and two in Middle Irish. Gildas, a sixth-century Briton, wrote On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain less as a historian than as a ...”

“... The way Riley plays with time (hence Sequence?) can give a reader the bends. Even worse, one may feel catapulted not only into Laura’s past, but into the past of Riley’s work. Her first-person narrators are iterations of the same woman writer, floating between cities and flats, with a colourful dating history and unendurable divorced parents. Reading ...”

“... students – clearly infantilised by their milieu, despite being in their mid-twenties – may be sorely tested. Is this a novel of ideas, or a novel about people who like to talk about ideas? I suspect the latter. And yet I wasn’t sure if it was the ideas or the people that made the book veer wildly between the entertaining and the banal. The ...”

“... wondered what had happened to the stipulation by Balfour that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.’ By and large, though, the tone was robustly self-satisfied, with plaudits for Israel and Britain in equal measure. Lord Turnberg (Labour): ‘Israel owes an enormous ...”

“... Even if you enjoy Southern California as much as Reyner Banham you may still, like him, draw the line at those discreetly fenced-in and fortified cities in which the better-off sometimes choose to live, and at whose gates the visitor must check with the guardians before being allowed to enter. I recently spent a few days in one of these suburban paradises ...”

“... were opposed to the war. Little did Mosley know how justified his case was. For instance, on 28 May 1940 the War Cabinet discussed the question whether the British should appeal to Mussolini as an intermediary with Hitler. Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, was keen on this or as keen as he could be on anything. Neville Chamberlain, until recently Prime ...”

“... who acclaim their fathers as so perfect that no decent facsimile could possibly be found. This may be the smallest tragedy that can befall a daughter. The greatest would seem to me to be the resentment felt by more than one of these writers against the ‘masculine’ elements in their own natures, strikingly and, I think, damagingly described by Sara ...”