“... so much creative licence as a deep identification between the author and her subject. Cheri may remind her of the women she grew up with: working-class women, perhaps without the protection of husbands; women who generally rely on other women. Beard’s essay feels like a bravura attempt to rescue Cheri from the loneliness of her death. The pieces in ...”

“... manuscript held in the Bodleian, one recipe gives a charm to secure favours, promising that ‘you may have whatever you want.’ It consists of a short prayer and a sequence of letters with no recognisable meaning, separated by crosses. At some later date, a reader went through the text with a needle, pricking pinholes through the letter shapes of the magical ...”

“... of papyrus from the rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus suggest that customs taxes on trade with India may have generated one-third of the total income of the Roman exchequer. Roman commentators were in despair about the drain of gold to India. Pliny the Elder called India ‘the sink of the world’s most precious metals’ – the converse of the complaint under ...”

“... before the delicatessens took over, he has a few sentences about the kind of life Manchester may be leaving behind: ‘This street culture is not about civic pride and marketing initiatives … It can, and will, thrive in crappy coffee bars, under leaking roofs or down unlit roads. It’s uncontrollable, uncomfortable and never far removed from the ...”

“... to servers in China. Whatever the truth of these accusations, they raise the question of what may be involved when organisations attached to a particular state intervene in an extensive and sustained way in another country and continent, even if their interest appears – and is proclaimed to be – commercially driven. They also raise questions about the ...”

“... capacity to ‘intuit the intangibles of the psychology of his opposite number’. He may have learned about Pat Nixon’s love of pandas on the first evening of the presidential visit in 1972, as they chatted over shark’s fin soup and the People’s Liberation Army Band played ‘Home on the Range’. But he probably already knew how desperate ...”

“... the past 20, 50 or a hundred years. It rarely refers to other books at all. Literary scholarship may not be an undiluted joy to its readers, but at least it’s usually founded on an ideal of the collaborative accretion of human knowledge. It’s frustrating that McGurl, a literary historian, occasionally seems to ignore the whole history of literature ...”

“... closer to getting a sale.’ Heale was one of 17 Ukip members elected to Kent County Council last May, making them the second biggest party. (Of the eight seats in Thanet, Ukip won seven.) Before that, in 2003, Heale stood as an independent against a Tory councillor but lost. Before that, he was a Conservative for twenty years. Before that, living in ...”

“... Thatcher if he chose. Lawson attached a personal memo to the one supplied by the Cabinet Office in May 1985, in which he said that ‘the proposal for a poll tax would be completely unworkable and politically catastrophic.’ But he did nothing to follow up on this warning and the plan was allowed to continue on its merry way. Lawson had decided that Thatcher ...”

“... secret agent. Al-Shiraa, the Lebanese magazine that leaked word of the arms supply on 1 November, may well have been enlisted by his political enemies in order to cripple his chances of greater prominence. There are at least two precedents for such American expeditions to Iran, both of them interventionary in the most literal sense. One was the notorious ...”

“... non-linear, experimental single plays inherited one to two million listeners from The Archers may have been that, unlike TV drama, radio drama doesn’t face direct commercial competition. But the success of radio in resisting homogenisation also applied to sectors which faced determined competition, and which nonetheless succeeded in rejuvenating and ...”

“... excerpts from published memoirs and reviews, and photographs taken on and off the set. It may be a close call for non-initiates, but I think the trip is worth the expense. Aficionados tend to divide between two touchstones, Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I belong to the first group but can see the point of the second: which way you go ...”

“... to utter words and to do so with unquestioned commitment to meaning. What the voice is singing may be swallowed up by the music, but that it is singing with an urgent intention to speak to us is how we know that the song is alive.It is easy to forget that when Schubert wrote his songs, the public lieder recital did not exist. The nearest thing to it was ...”

“... It is barely worth speaking of anything as tangible as motive in Robert Ford’s murder. Robbery may have been involved, though McCluskie has always denied that it was. Any part it did play was tangential. ‘We had a go at him to get some money,’ Reynolds told the police, ‘he gave me 10p and when I asked for more he said he didn’t have any and ...”

“... Know your enemy, and know yourself, and you may fight a hundred battles and not lose one. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c.450 BC The historian William Manchester, who served with him in the Pacific, said he was the greatest soldier in American history. Never much regarded in Britain, he is still recalled with loathing in Australia ...”