“... is very much an initiative of the left. The Second International Cittaslow Conference was held in May, in the neighbouring fishing villages of Pioppi and Acciaroli, part of the commune of Pollica in the Cilento national park, fifty miles down the coast from Salerno. Cittaslow is an international network of small towns, established in Orvieto during the 1999 ...”

“... escape was vanishingly rare, rather than the norm. The game is hard to come by these days, and it may anyway be time for something more contemporary: ‘Escape from Guantanamo’, perhaps, though to make it worth playing it would need a few extra inauthentic details – the possibility of escape, say, or getting a fair trial if you roll a double six. One ...”

“... from view in a sustained fit of unsociability such that you wonder whether the mailbox may not be a blind, put up outside someone else’s house in the hope of siphoning off unwanted communications from the outside world. Its latest appearance is as the jacket photograph on an odd compilation called Letters to J.D. Salinger (Wisconsin, £20.95), in ...”

“... seem, is wisely making contingency plans in the event of Abolition. But I digress. The Prince may be short, but it clearly isn’t short enough for today’s cheese magnates. A new edition, turbo-entitled Power, is now available (Profile, £2.99). Weighing in at a mere 46g, and measuring only 15 x 10 x 0.6 cm3, it will slip effortlessly into a breast ...”

“... well-meaning: ‘If we go back far enough in time, almost everyone living in Britain today may be seen to have their origins elsewhere … Britain is proud of its tradition of providing a safe haven for people fleeing persecution and conflict.’ Well, yes and no. But the fun really starts when you get to the descriptions of everyday domestic ...”

“... ask why), it was all a bit of a shambles, as Censorinus makes delightfully clear. Be that as it may, the sad fact remains that however I try to fiddle it, I don’t share a birthday with Caesar. Time to give up those plans of conquering ...”

“... undermining his ‘Saddam was a bad man’ justification for going to war in Iraq – suggests he may have recently become more of a realpolitiker). In the last Tintin adventure that Hergé completed, Tintin et les Picaros (1976), Tintin – by this time an almost insufferable prig – helps his old friend General Alcazar reclaim power in San Theodoros from ...”

“... roughly a third of which appeared in two recent issues of the London Review (15 April and 20 May), is to be published in its entirety in September by the Waywiser Press. In his obituary of Wollheim in the Independent last November, John Richardson wrote that Germs – which Wollheim thought ‘the best piece of work’ he had ‘ever done’ – ‘must ...”

“... into the blogosphere and the rest of the internet along a chain of endlessly forking paths. That may well sound like your idea of a nightmare, which is just one of the many reasons the internet isn’t going to make books obsolete anytime soon. Publishing an anthology of blogs in book form, then, would appear to make about as much sense as broadcasting ...”

“... in the future due to being deceased’, a wording that gives pause. The fate of how all this may depend on her pearls, her teeth. The fate of the sentence, ‘We are really sorry, we made a mistake,’ which Judge Dillard utters in a hypothetical context but still it’s good to hear. The fate of the government lawyer who is blonde and talks too ...”

“... which seems to proceed by intuition. Work of this kind is inevitably uneven, but the theatre may still be something to relish. Her paintings invoke turbulent and transgressive sensory experiences – they seem to come in and out of focus, slowly revealing recognisable details. Looking at her churning surfaces, I was reminded of Hannah Sullivan’s poem ...”

“... Moon and brought back the stones. What does change is humanity and his thinking.’ Whatever that may mean exactly, you would not gather from it how nicely tied and labelled the stones were. The stamps, franking and address are like a footnote in a page of Saul Steinberg’s The Passport, the whole item as elegant as one of the examples of traditional ...”

“... strong gust, one imagines, will deck the lot of them. It’s Pilger’s hope that these pictures may ‘offer inspiration to a new generation of eyewitness photographers’. But Reporting the World is also a tribute to his editors – the nurturers and tough guys, authorisers of fantastic foreign travel tabs – who had the trust of their proprietors, or the ...”

“... Kim, you may remember, leaves school to work for the Survey of India. I have no idea how many of the Survey’s employees were spies, but one of them did do the kind of secret work Kipling describes. He was a schoolmaster, Nain Singh. In 1865 he entered Tibet – forbidden to foreigners on pain of death – disguised as a lama, and mapped Lhasa ...”

“... herself nurtures in them the technical skills which will fit them in the modern world, but which may unfit them – as they did for Paul – for home. Anton, the elder, inherits Eduard’s old camera, and works in a film propaganda unit during the war. Like his father, he learns skills in war which will make his fortune after it; like his father too, he ...”