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“... Good Book says, come to us all. We all know that each of us will soon disappear from the Earth. David Raup’s book compounds our pessimism by pointing out that – if humans are anything like other animals – the fate awaiting our species as a whole is also an almost certain annihilation. Very few creatures persist for ...”

“... in a blog for the Telegraph of a Treasury aide who’d said to him that ‘Alex Salmond wants to be William Wallace.’ ‘No,’ Martin corrected him. ‘Alex Salmond wants to be Robert the Bruce.’ Wallace has been cast as ‘the people’s champion’, a role he played in the 1975 novel The Wallace ...”

“... Kelley was opposed to authorised books, believing that the art of biography should never be a branch of the public relations industry, and neither should journalism. ‘Approval’ was irrelevant. It could be said that Kelley often took a little too much pleasure in the delinquencies she spotted. She once stole a ...”

“... David Fincher’s The Social Network, which tells the story of Facebook, is fast and intelligent and mean, a sort of screwball comedy without the laughs. It’s written by Aaron Sorkin, whose credits include The West Wing and A Few Good Men, and based on a novelised history by Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires ...”

“... David Craig has an unfashionable concern with truth-telling in fiction. In his earlier role as a literary critic, he wrote a book called The Real Foundations in which he showed how some of the most respected 19th and 20th-century novelists and poets had blatantly falsified social reality. If a work of realistic fiction is to be convincing in general, according to Craig, it ought to convince us in particulars ...”

“... across mighty oceans of investigations and tip-offs. The lucky journalist to reach it first would be rewarded with arguably the greatest political scoop of our time: he or she would finally reveal why Harold Wilson, to the astonishment of the entire political and journalistic world, suddenly took himself off to obscurity. Harold Wilson had dominated the ...”

“... argues in the opening chapter of Words for the Taking, ‘lead lives of quiet inspiration, blessed by the calling that damns us to obscurity’. Bowers’s well-crafted poems earned him a solid reputation on the circuit, and his work was regularly accepted by magazines such as Poetry, whose September 1990 issue included ...”

“... baffling complexity, heaving with activity as so many people went about their separate occasions by day, and lying in a deep calm by night. Many since Wordsworth have felt the magic of the city, but until recently there has been little real attempt to rationalise urban processes. There have been plenty of ...”

“... career and to see what he can make of it, at a distance of forty years or more. And nothing could be more natural for any man, after the death of a wife to whom he had been married for 50 years, to turn out a heap of old letters which had been exchanged between them long ago. It must be highly unusual, however, for these ...”

“... the Parliamentary system’. The ‘occasion’ to which she refers is the inquiry being conducted by a new officer of her House, Sir Gordon Downey, Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. Sir Gordon is investigating allegations of corruption made against certain MPs by the Guardian newspaper. The allegations referred to ...”

“... In J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Disgrace, which is set in a violent post-apartheid South Africa, David Lurie, a Cape Town academic, reaches a similar conclusion when his daughter Lucy is gang-raped by three black men at her isolated homestead in the Eastern Cape. ‘But why did they hate me so?’ Lucy asks. ‘I had never ...”

“... the only heartening note was the outright condemnation of the BBC’s apology (and its abjectness) by its most distinguished broadcaster, David Attenborough. With a constituency that far outnumbers that of the Labour Party and a voice that is more respected and indeed loved than any politician’s can hope to ...”

“... a certain amount of huffing and puffing among the usually imperturbable gallery-going set about David Shrigley’s Brain Activity exhibition at the Hayward (until 13 May). People who value the power of art to shock far too highly ever to be shocked by it themselves, have nevertheless ...”

“... Few can still be unaware that 1980 in Britain is as much the Year of the Viking as of forest fires, record interest-rates and the SAS. There is, for once, no ostensible centenary reason for this, although, as a matter of fact, the year 980 did see the resumption of the Danish raids that were to culminate in Cnut’s kingship of England ...”

“... This scrupulous study by the Dutch scholar Karel van der Toorn of how the Hebrew Bible was written and then evolved over time is in most respects finely instructive. Some of what Toorn has to say involves concepts long familiar to Bible scholars, though even in this regard he provides many fresh insights. Nearly all the book’s argument, moreover, offers a strong corrective to popular misconceptions about the Bible ...”