“... writes, ‘which, in the words of the Gospel, makes our eye and heart clean.’ Great stories may contain sermons and end happily; the trick’s in the weaving together. Leskov’s risky narrative choice, repeated from story to story, comes not in the dubious opposition between the anecdotal and the ideological but in the balance of suffering and ...”

“... In his annual letter to the shareholders of Amazon, he acknowledges that some of his decisions may seem inexplicable, but ‘it’s all about the long-term.’ To that end, he has donated $42 million to the construction of the Clock of the Long Now, which is supposed to tick for 10,000 years. His temporarily is not our temporarily. Bezos was born in 1964 ...”

“... describing myself here, obviously, and many others, but the point is that although the audience may have been the same, the readers came to him via different routes, and there were simply more of them. Also, usefully, and crucially, SF writers attract not only readers but actual fans, if not of the full-blown psychotic Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes in Misery ...”

“... the research that has been carried out into how it works. For most of us the stories from the lab may be of less interest than the wider implications: how the drugs that have been developed through it have transformed medicine. Tarantino notwithstanding, adrenaline to the heart is unlikely to save your life, but through the judicious blocking or mimicking of ...”

“... a feminine relationship of jealous comparison might develop: Who spits better? To write a novel may be pure pleasure. To live a novel presents certain difficulties. As for reading a novel, I do my best to get out of it. I no longer have collaborators. I used to be envious of them. They repel those readers whom I want to lose myself. From a torch ...”

“... slave-traders and opportunists of every sort followed in the wake of Roman armies, and it may have been Rome’s high-handed confiscation of part of the Pontic kingdom during the regency of Mithridates’ mother that first set him implacably against the rise of the western hegemon. From the beginning, Mithridates could play the typical local ...”

“... by Apollo 11’s commander). Apollo 11’s commander, Neil Armstrong, took saying less to what we may as well call cosmic extremes. He went silent, became absent, allegedly working but never seen, the J.D. Salinger of the US space programme. The race for the Moon was fuelled by a terrifying combustion of scientific know-how and political paranoia. But the ...”

“... and principle in their working lives when faced with destructive herd instincts. Politicians may be confused about what they mean by the personal responsibility the state expects from the population at large, but we the people are in a similar fog about the responsibility we might expect of our elected representatives. Responsibility has a ...”

“... of porn that the non-pornographic bits should be as tedious and dilatory as possible, which may be one explanation for the dyers’ disputes in Birdsong, but this means that in satisfying his readers’ requirements sooner Faulks is doing them a disservice by not giving them what they don’t want. Perhaps it’s because he has the hope of moving on to ...”

“... a useful and up-to-date survey. He reminds us that Sappho’s poems were songs, and that while we may have regrettably few of their words, their musical accompaniment on the lyre is entirely lost. He is sensible and wisely not too specific about the precise nature of Sappho’s undoubted homoeroticism, seeing it as by no means incompatible with heterosexual ...”

“... zoology, the History of Animals – are the subject of Armand Marie Leroi’s new book. Aristotle may be most famous for his Physics and Politics, but his most voluminous writings were biological. Leroi celebrates him as the first truly scientific thinker, in a modern sense: the first to observe, describe and attempt to classify biology systematically, in all ...”

“... Tsipras paid a visit to Kaisariani, the site of a massacre of communist partisans by the Nazis in May 1944. The privatisation of Piraeus by the Chinese shipping company Cosco ‘was to be reviewed in favour of the Greek people’. Plans to close refugee detention centres were announced. Illegal immigrants could no longer be randomly frisked by the ...”

“... had value – if there were still ears to hear – his music would be … just music.Shostakovich may have said something like this, but it’s not Power that put ‘history’ (the artist’s struggle) and ‘biography’ in his music, but Shostakovich himself. Take that away, and a lot of his appeal to audiences, both Russian and Western, would ...”

“... cap had to remain unmoved as the bodies tumbled into the pit at Minsk. Between 23 April and 2 May 1942, a series of meetings, some very protracted, took place between Himmler and his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, and between Himmler and Hitler. Although little is known of what exactly was said, Longerich concludes from the timing and intensity of these ...”

“... Major believes, are a direct legacy of Marie Lloyd and Bessie Bellwood. Music hall may have started out raucous, but it gradually became more refined. The early theatres presented young women dressed only in flesh-coloured body stockings and one venue had to close when Wiry Sal danced the cancan with an enthusiasm deemed excessive by London ...”