“... a woman who travels to Norway with thirty sex-starved sailors and a man called Stevenson – who may be based on Borges, who admired Robert Louis Stevenson. Williamson presents Borges’s visit to St Andrews as a coming to terms with his early lost love.The New Yorker writer Alastair Reid, a Scot who was one of Borges’s translators and with whom Borges ...”

“... here. When his uncle Hugo is diagnosed with brain cancer, Toby recognises that caring for him may aid his own recovery. Toby and Melissa move into Ivy House, where Toby and his cousins, Leon and Susanna, used to spend summers under Hugo’s relaxed supervision. While Melissa is at work, Toby helps Hugo, a genealogist, with his research, but this ...”

“... last few weeks as chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote to the candidates vying to succeed Theresa May as leader of the Conservative Party and asked them to pledge that, if elected, they would retain his target of bringing down national debt as a percentage of GDP. ‘If we do not commit to getting our debt down after a nine-year run of uninterrupted economic ...”

“... he said. He spent much of his time away from court, writing to his mother that he ‘faced, if I may say so, no opponent other than Your Majesty yourself’. Power was not shared equally: Maria Theresa made the decisions. But Joseph refused to give his assent if he disagreed, though his mother saw such refusals as betrayals. Numerous reports refer to her ...”

“... Harry Graham is perhaps overworked, though children, who are never satisfied with a mere taste, may not agree. None in this genre is as good as Ogden Nash’s ‘Termite’. Some primal termite knocked on wood And tasted it, and found it good; And that is why your Cousin May Fell through the parlour floor ...”

“... but this was a parliament in which council members played leading roles. The king in council may not have been able to enact legislation but he could certainly make ordinances in areas of government such as foreign relations and control of the military, trade, printing, coinage and aliens. Over the following centuries, the council became a central part ...”

“... to suit the large number of ex-Liberal voters who supported it. That government collapsed in May 1940. Churchill’s wartime administration was a genuine coalition of virtually all the country’s political forces and after its break-up we had no coalitions until 2010. British politicians from the dominant parties of the day have never been keen on ...”

“... an epithet Ward tries out once and then discards – but a ‘Grand Monopoliser’ of wit. That may be too cynical, and it happened that Tonson’s most virulent critics in his lifetime were also his political enemies: diehard Tories like Ward or William Shippen, who first published Dryden’s nasty epigram, and portrayed the Kit-Cats in Faction Display’d ...”

“... word in the poem to ‘demon’ might lead us to prefer Hays’s version. But then with Brecht we may not want the theological dimension of Kafka’s claim, and if we’re in an atheistic mood, we can think he just means ‘very very bad’. In any case, the word certainly also means ‘angry’. The situation becomes more delicate when Rilke, in the ...”

“... rises. They asked the king to ensure that ‘all people, of whatever estate or condition they may be, may freely determine their consumption of victuals and apparel for themselves, their wives, children and servants in the manner that seems best to them for their own profit.’ The joyful consumerism continued for ...”

“... Sinn Féin looks set to become the largest party in the assembly following elections on 5 May. O’Neill may well become first minister – the first nationalist to hold the post. Donaldson has said this would be a ‘real problem’ for unionists.In times of crisis, unionism reverts to the Lundy principle. This has ...”

“... to Seleucus in the early days of 285. He spent his remaining years as a captive. Demetrius may sound like a biographer’s dream. But he has often been dismissed as an ‘also ran’ among the big personalities of the Hellenistic era, a mercurial general whose excesses got the better of him, or as nothing more than a ‘mirror’ of his time. Pat ...”

“... hold. Hot blood is at the heart of Hill’s theological, oppositional poetics. Man’s passions may turn vicious, but without them he is unredeemable. Hence Hill’s admiration for righteous anger and blood sacrifice. Blood, in his poems, functions as a metonym for sincerity as much as savagery; and the image of fake blood (a ‘wound’ from a ‘red ...”

“... alive in the fire of his astounding music.’ Even when Prokofiev slipped out of Petrograd in May 1918 on what turned out to be the last Trans-Siberian Express to reach Vladivostok, his plan was for a half-year US tour, after which he would return home. That the six months would turn into nine years was perhaps foreseeable, but it certainly was not – by ...”

“... a novel like this would stream out of a 13-year-old’s pen isn’t convincing, however: Mitchell may work fast – he’s had four novels published in seven years – but that doesn’t mean the prose splurges out. The supposed naturalism of Jason’s voice is highly artificial, and making romantic claims for its authenticity puts it under more strain than ...”