“... Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker’s ethereal blonde girlfriend, who would haunt him as Kim Novak haunts James Stewart in Vertigo; The Unmasking of Green Goblins 1, 2, and 3 (a shock each time); The Marriage of Aunt May to Doctor Octopus (an odious villain) – were well behind him. And Peter Parker had settled for what seemed to us a second-best girlfriend, the ...”

“... during the war to get a couple of barely plausible schemes for experimental weapons sponsored by Lord Mountbatten, the head of Combined Operations. The most famous of these was Project Habbakuk (two Bs and two Ks, as opposed to the biblical prophet Habakkuk, one B and three Ks – the point is made at least three times in the course of the novel). The ...”

“... attributing the coinage to Simon Sebag Montefiore (elsewhere it is attributed to Professor James Matisoff, a celebrated coiner of neologisms). But however we wish to describe it, the phenomenon is achieved, if not quite without firing a shot, at least without the deployment of huge armies or indeed of organised nation states. Only briefly under the ...”

“... shouts: ‘A daughter pregnant at 16 and a son who’s queer, what did I ever do to the good Lord?’ The parents begin to police their son. The father pretends he could lose his job if his son’s homosexuality becomes known. The mother roots through the love letters her boy is receiving and throws them hysterically in his face. The narrator coolly ...”

“... and ‘popular’ literature became even more marked: ‘For every reader of Henry James and D.H. Lawrence,’ the publisher Michael Joseph observed in 1925, ‘there are a hundred readers of Nat Gould and Ethel M. Dell.’ And if we look further forward into the interwar period, the peaks of the popular market become higher still, especially ...”

“... to say camp’. Pevsner agreed: ‘very pretty’. It was the work of Paul Paget and John Seely, Lord Mottistone. In spirit, if not detail, it is heir to Colen Campbell’s Ebberston Hall near Scarborough: sprightly and miles away from Office of Works Georgian, RAF Neo-Georgian, War Office Georgian.Perhaps the Architecture of the Modern Age had already ...”

“... Sofia Andrukhovych, Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia Andrukhovychtranslated by Uilleam BlackerOn​  the first day, we hid in the Mins’ka metro station with our dog, Zlata ...”

“... the latest leaflet, or procuring another drink. And there were the Americans. I remember James Fenton noticing how they would cluster a little closer together and talk in a fashion slightly more intense. Mainly Rhodes or Fulbright scholars, they had come from every state of the union with what amounted to a free pass. The Yanks of Oxford were ...”

“... still shocking.In 1922 thousands had gathered to watch the new MPs take the night mail to London. James Maxton, the most charismatic of the group, assured the crowd that ‘they would see the atmosphere of the Clyde getting the better of the House of Commons.’ Maxton and his colleagues were members of the Independent Labour Party (until 1918 you couldn’t ...”

“... well as a scholar,’ Norman said. ‘As a reward I’m going to let you hear my impersonation of Lord Beaverbrook. My ex-wife Jeannie Campbell was his daughter and he hated me. We just didn’t see eye to eye.’ He then impersonated the great English press baron at length. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said, ‘but I think that’s quite good.’ ‘Yeah, he ...”

“... the New Model Army chaplain Hugh Peter, his sidekick ‘i’the Machiavilian world’: the future Lord Protector’s outsize red toper’s nose, a staple of royalist humour, eventually takes on celestial dimensions as a comet portending Charles’s doom. Cromwell’s avowed republicanism masks his aspirant despotism, the implication being that no avowal of ...”

“... is now on exhibition’. The despoliation of Poland and Russia by the Nazis is not comparable to Lord Elgin’s endeavours in Athens. But the reason Elgin gave for removing chunks of the Parthenon (with Turkish permission) was similar to the one quoted above: he wanted to save the marbles from being destroyed by Turkish and Greek soldiers. The Germans were ...”

“... in which the angel foretells not a Christian parousia but the unaccountable birth each time my lord the light, a cat and you share this domestic miracle. The book’s strategically-placed concluding poem, ‘For a Godchild’, makes it clear how little Tomlinson is tempted by any miraculous other than the sublunary: it decides to educate his godchild out ...”

“... years there was nothing else – no new poems. New Zealand poetry in the Sixties was dominated by James K. Baxter (born 1926) – a Byronic figure at once careless, prolific and brilliant who had (in the phrase I think Russians use of writers after Gogol) crawled out from Curnow’s overcoat, and who for a few years seemed destined to eclipse his master. In ...”

“... which had scarred the early stages of the conflict, that the sporting spirit was not enough. Lord Rosebery, presenting the FA Cup in 1897, might assert that football helped bring out those ‘splendid characteristics of the British race – stamina and indomitable pluck’ (I take the quotation from one of the first works to bring the history of sport in ...”