“... Mist. Readers who find the foregoing facts a bit irregular – that’s to say, untypical – may never have had the pleasure of Fred and Judy Vermorel’s excellent Starlust: The Secret Life of Fans, a book which has no trouble persuading you that the desires and preoccupations of fans are the most beautiful and worrying things about modern pop. Here’s ...”

“... than U-235), it is very unlikely that it could have made it small enough for missile delivery. It may be able to deliver a weapon from a plane, but given the air superiority of the US this is not a significant threat. Far more real is the DPRK’s ability to threaten a conventional artillery attack on Seoul, where more than ten million people live. This kind ...”

“... every Indian pollster forecast another BJP triumph before the election results were announced in May. Few believed that the Italian-born head of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty could lead the Congress-dominated alliance to victory. In the 1990s, threatened by a possible challenge from Mario Cuomo, the governor of New York, Bill Clinton declared that the American ...”

“... is no extenuation. Neither is the plea that violence and privation, the sacrifice of the present, may be the price of breaking through to a better future. George Kline dismissed this in The Trotsky Reappraisal (1992) as ‘the fallacy of historically deferred value . . . a moral monstrosity’. Monstrous or not, it’s a bargain with the future which, as ...”

“... the marriage was far from lacking in love. There were times when Hetta’s exercise of her freedom may have caused Empson some pain; he missed her badly when she went off to Hong Kong for a year with a lover, and seems to have been a little unhappy when she added illegitimately to the family (possibly, as Haffenden suggests, more because of his sense of ...”

“... was to be uniquely human. The worst worry is that the machines will refuse our orders, that they may acquire a will of their own, and want free agency. You start out with some matter-of-fact presumptions about what each sort of entity really is. If you’re reading this piece, you’re almost certainly a person, and you assume that its other readers are ...”

“... the whole thing in a proper chronological order, not like this mish-mash I’m making you.’ He may only be a literary construct, but his instincts are sound. Postmodernism as Chabon practises it is a laminate of uncertainty and overconfidence, a formula for taking risks that is actually pretty safe. Think the jumbled chronology works? Great. Think it ...”

“... supervision, state torture has become so commonplace that Human Rights Watch recently concluded it may amount to a crime against humanity; all protest has been rendered effectively illegal, extrajudicial killings have soared and the number of political prisoners is believed to exceed sixty thousand. The government has censored hundreds of websites and drafted ...”

“... interest is often key to the appearance of a writer’s work in another language; it may make their fortune: Anthea Bell (Englishing Sebald) and Ann Goldstein (voicing Elena Ferrante) propelled the authors to cult status beyond their own shores. Like a shrub moved to a sunnier position, writers may thrive when ...”

“... of that there sort of writing,’ he wrote to a friend, back in his home idiom again. ‘It may be bawdy – but is it not good English? it may be profligate – but is it not life, is it not the thing? – Could any man have written it – who has not lived in the world?’ Shelley, by contrast, entertained very ...”

“... of all the ministers of death’, and its preferred targets were children. In the past, you may have had something like a one in three chance of getting the disease and, if you did get it, a one in five chance of dying, though some outbreaks killed 50 per cent of the afflicted. Now smallpox is no more. In 1980, the World Health Organisation declared it ...”

“... the rest of us. Certain writers’ books get ‘fenced off by enthusiasts, and the casual reader may feel the need of credentials to read them’. Between 1956 and 1981 Mary Renault published eight novels set in ancient Greece that made her enormously, wildly popular. These days, though she’s never been out of print – this is the second reissue of her ...”

“... his second, more narrowly focused, but equally instructive new book, The Saint-Napoléon. Readers may initially wonder if they have missed a Napoleon among the pantheon of Catholic saints, but no one had heard of him until 1805, when Napoleon asked the pope to canonise a new saint for his birthday. With Rome under the control of the French army, the pope ...”

“... use the day room. They were also given simple tasks which they were required to do together. (This may be the much more gripping prototype of Big Brother, although in the modern version everyone in the house deludedly believes themselves to be celebrities or interesting.) At the first meeting Rokeach asked the three men their names. Joseph said: ‘My name is ...”

“... is only one. Moreover, rather than becoming stronger during the interim period, the Palestinians may grow weaker, come more under the Israeli thumb, and therefore be less able to dispute the Israeli claim when the last set of negotiations begins. But on the matter of how, by what specific mechanism, to get from an interim status to a later one, the document ...”