“... who specialises in ripping yarns of war and espionage, full of sympathy and comic irony, which read like thrillers yet thrive on fact. Soon after the Hampstead party, Fuchs was recruited by Soviet military intelligence, to which he passed notes about fission in the uranium isotope U-235, usually by means of circuitous taxi rides or in parcels left on ...”

“... Sinclair Lewis won the first American Nobel Prize he said she should have got it instead. She was read by H.L. Mencken with ‘increasing joy’. She was also lampooned for writing in the style of the Ladies’ Home Journal, dismissed by modernist-minded critics like Edmund Wilson, and accused in 1933 by Granville Hicks, a ubiquitous critic then in his ...”

“... Fascism but about our system, or any form of totalitarian regime’. The facts of his life can be read either way. The Shostakovich family, like most Petersburg intellectuals, held mildly radical views in 1917; there was even a Bolshevik uncle on his mother’s side. Mitya, who was 11 in 1917, was a child prodigy, and despite the unpropitious times achieved ...”

“... to have been one of Buhari’s aides, though he provides no details – this is pretty hard to read without flinching. But the double standards at work shouldn’t distract from the bogusness of the do-gooding part of Blair’s proposition. Deliverology is itself a false prospectus. It relies on the assumption that Blair gradually mastered these skills on ...”

“... jokers trade in is much more volatile. It congratulates itself on an audience-defying perversity. Read the list of ingredients: argument, intelligence, spiteful syntax, information overload. A negative dialectic that can live uxoriously with itself, assertive in its modesty. Poetry. An embarrassing word. The project is anachronistic. Well-meaning (but ...”

“... landscape that can be expressed as follows: if you want to know what’s happening in the world, read the New York Times. If you want to know what’s wrong with what’s happening in the world, read the Guardian. If you want to know what’s going to happen next in the world (unless tinpot leftists wreck ...”

“... in the Times endorsed this verdict: ‘All who love that kind of children’s book that can be read and reread by adults should take note that a new star has appeared in this constellation.’ This time the complimentary comparison was with The Wind in the Willows. Children will be enchanted, but educated adult readers will appreciate the novel’s ...”

“... that cricket writers are short of topics. The merest smidgeon of a smile twitched my lips when I read of the Gatting incident. His team so far have crisscrossed the Australian continent so many times that it is doubtful if their body clocks will ever catch up. What Gatting failed to do was arrive at the ground in time for the start of the match against ...”

“... the rationalisations. This script could certainly have made a good film: it was intended for Richard Lester in 1982, but ‘the finances were never found.’ The other three film scripts have become real movies. One of them, The Comfort of Strangers, is another macabre: it adapts Ian McEwan’s novel about an Italian sadist and his subservient wife ...”

“... laced with menace, but, being slightly deaf, I cannot hear them. I wonder if it helps that I have read the book? In fact, despite my familiarity with Bram Stoker’s masterpiece and my ability to decode the book’s multi-layered subtexts about, among other things, colonialism, sadomasochistic sex, miscegenation and vaccination, I am not doing very well at ...”

“... however. Calasso may move effortlessly from Pol Pot to Goethe, or from discussion of the Vedas to Richard Cobb’s favourite uncle, but in the process he is always rehearsing the same ideas about sacrifice, revolution and modernity. The crucial question is whether the repetition of these ideas in so many different contexts reinforces or diffuses their ...”

“... estate. Over the years other hands had tried to pluck away the veils from the Coward legend. We read how Coward, then a Swiss national, was found in bed reading the proofs of Sheridan Morley’s A Talent to Amuse (1969). ‘How is it?’ he was asked. ‘I’m afraid Sherry has to do a bit more work,’ was the reply. ‘There are still a few old ladies in ...”

“... myself seriously as a student. In fact, it seemed to make it somewhat easier for me to write.’ Richard Klein, now the celebrated author of Cigarettes Are Sublime, was one of the guys. Approached by Duke for a quote, he wrote: ‘For decades I have felt guilt and shame for having performed toward her in a way that was unprofessional, exploitative, and lousy ...”

“... the same time she was lent a copy of First Principles by Herbert Spencer. She had three days to read it, and Spencer’s vision of human evolution towards the Absolute remained with her for a lifetime. At 18 she had a long conversation, which was profoundly important to her, with an African woman. This woman said to her: God cannot be good, otherwise why ...”