“... one of the new breed of ruthless mercenaries emerging in the later 14th century, men like Sir John Hawkwood, the leader of the legendary White Company, whose monument can still be seen in the Duomo in Florence next to Dante’s, who hired themselves out to petty tyrants and brought terror and destruction wherever they went. Moreover, Jones ...”

“... thinking, yet the move, it not divisive, Can’t help at this stage seeming indecisive. But John De Lorean shows more than strain In several parts of that uplifted face. The handcuffs induce shame on top of pain As in Los Angeles he falls from grace. Busted with many kilos of cocaine Packed nearly in a custom pig-skin case, He’s proved his gull-winged ...”

“... imperialistic or infectious irony can be. Two notable warnings are not accommodated by Enright. John Crowe Ransom’s: ‘We should be so much in favour of tragedy and irony as not to think it good policy to require them in all our poems, for fear we might bring them into bad fame.’ And T.S. Eliot’s: ‘What we rebel against is neither the use of irony ...”

“... was shot down in a Sochaux café. A double agent known as Max Foret betrayed the wireless operator John Young and the courier Diana Rowden (he was shot at Mauthausen; she met a dreadful death at the Natzweiler camp in the Vosges hills). Of the 12 agents who worked most closely with Harry in those few months, only six survived. And he came to suspect that his ...”

“... Endymion and gifts for the local rulers, including some gunpowder and a kaleidoscope. To hide his Christian identity he assumed the unconvincing pseudonym ‘el Ritchie’. The reader can only watch in sad fascination as this little figure from Regency London, asthmatic and under-financed, recedes further and further into the dust and danger of Africa until ...”

“... Barnsley, Edinburgh, the Best of British Authors campaign, the Best of Young British Authors, Christian Book Fortnight, the Spring Military Book Campaign, National Children’s Book Week, Map and Guide Month, Thriller Week ... And the Hungarian book trade is necessarily a great deal more centralised than the British. There are far fewer publishers – not ...”

“... I knew what she meant. I had these friends, the Routledge twins: Andrew and Peter. My own two Christian names, as it happened, but divided up like that I didn’t recognise them as mine. Andrew was quiet and cautious, Peter quick and reckless. They lived on a mucky farm nearby; you turned out of the village along a concrete track which ran flat for a bit ...”

“... which in fact contradicts it, because late Picasso surely begins in 1964 (the starting-point of Christian Geelhaar’s pioneering show at Basle in 1981 of ‘Pablo Picasso. Das Spaetwerk’). And the exhibition is essentially one of paintings, drawings and prints of 1964-1972, prefaced by a selection of paintings and sculptures with a starting-point at the ...”

“... him, rush to fill the vacuum that Disraeli’s half-self leaves open. Jewish without being Jewish; Christian and yet of the East, not the West; Conservative and yet not of the blood; a man, but with dark ringlets and foppish, half-formed male friends. These are the inversions, the gaps, that Disraeli exhibits and inhabits: a way of expressing the ...”

“... had a crush on. She throws herself on the mercy of a mad, obsessive fan. The minor story concerns John, an evil Coke-monster Hollywood film producer of huge-budget action movies. After a near-death experience with the flu – ‘His heart leapt with the knowledge that it wasn’t drugs or excessive living that had his jaws chattering like a tree full of ...”

“... to fill in the details of his life, written with affection, humour and perspicacity by the pianist John Tilbury. Tilbury was Cardew’s friend and colleague, and a one-time (and part-time) fellow-traveller on the Maoist road; he has spent a quarter of a century writing this book. Aficionados will love his account; others might have preferred a more succinct ...”

“... Muggletonians was, notably, Christopher Hill, who found significant links between these people and John Milton, as they drank and argued in the London pubs of the 1650s. For Hill and Thompson these were ‘radicals’, political as well as religious activists, part of Hill’s World Turned Upside Down. A vertical history of the subject could not at that time ...”

“... ends with the monster fatally stabbing Frankenstein before leaping into the crater of Mount Etna; John Atkinson Kerr’s The Monster and Magician; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (1826) has Frankenstein and the monster grappling in a boat which is struck by a thunderbolt: ‘the waves vomit forth a mass of fire and the Magician and his unhallowed abortion are ...”

“... in Action. Entirely absent, or mentioned only in passing, are Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Yoo, Elliott Abrams, Ahmed Chalabi, Ayad Allawi, Rick Santorum, Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, Richard Armitage, Katherine Harris, Ken Mehlman, Paul O’Neill, Rush Limbaugh. Barely appearing at all are John Ashcroft, Samuel ...”

“... disloyalty, ambition, greed, insecurity and all the British hypocrisies that he crashed into. John Preston has made the most of it, providing not only a very readable and amusing book but also the fullest account yet of what actually happened. Some of his sourcing could be clearer – there are rather vague appendices and no footnotes – but he is ...”