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“... first of four volumes. He has used a far wider range of sources than was available to Professor Richard Ullman when he began his masterly three-volume account of the same events. The title of this first book is somewhat misleading, for the focus is British: no attempt has been made to use the French archives, which still await exploration. Moreover, and ...”

“... there are mistakes. The British diplomat kidnapped by the Quebec separatists was James Cross, not Richard Gross. The man sitting between Yassir Arafat and George Habash at the Tripoli Arab Summit Conference in 1977 was Zuhair Mohsin of SAIQA – not, as Claire Sterling suggests, Ahmed Jibril of the PFLP, to whom she devotes an entire chapter. The fate of her ...”

“... is little to guide us through the copious text. It is to be hoped that this will prompt people to read it right through. Those who do so will certainly be rewarded. Farington writes well and with care (there is evidence to suggest that he made preliminary drafts of some of his narrative), and quite apart from any literary pleasure, a close reading of a diary ...”

“... which gives a full account of Agatha Christie’s work, making even plot-summaries a joy to read. If Robert Barnard sometimes seems more astute than his subject, he’s delightfully appreciative of her strategies, of the right and proper use of character stereotypes, and of Mayhem Parva, her own special English village fantasy with its definitions of ...”

“... stones’ is both the first and the last line of the poem. ‘The Duke’s Pagoda’ might be read as a companion-piece, or counterstatement, to Stevens’s ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, where the firmly accomplished placing of a simple artefact in the middle of a sprawling landscape has the power to fix an order upon it. The Duke’s vision is ...”

“... of an interrogation about the lost letters, had incriminated himself to the solicitor-general, Richard Rich. Urged by Rich to accept the new law, More had allegedly replied: ‘Your conscience will save you, and my conscience will save me.’ Rich had then, it seems, played the classic stool pigeon’s trick of disclaiming any authority to embark on the ...”

“... man who became her second husband, John McHale, she was largely forgotten in Britain. The sculptor Richard Smith, and McHale himself, suffered similar neglect after leaving the UK.By the time I visited her, Cordell’s memories of the 1950s were patchy. For long stretches we said little. She smoked Carlton 100s and showed me a few collages by McHale that she ...”

“... years ago and is out of practice). I try to concentrate on the sights. They’re the ones you read about in tourist brochures: the blue Mediterranean, looming Mount Lebanon, the mosques and churches, side by side. And then there’s a statue of a shopping trolley, a massive structure overlooking the ringroad as if it’s the best and biggest symbol Beirut ...”

“... them slumber on. They are the D-Day Dodgers Who’ll stay in Italy. Then after Christmas I read Gabriele Annan’s review in the LRB (7 January) of James Fox’s The Langhorne Sisters – Nancy had been the middle one of the five – and began to understand. Not long afterwards I looked through the manuscript memoirs of my old head of chambers, John ...”

“... of Francis Spufford’s engaging new book calls them, meaning above all Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins – believe in spite of all evidence that eventually the religious will see sense. And yet with their magical belief in the truth of science – their taking for granted a consensus about the value of scientific evidence – and their unspoken ...”

“... die, her will lavished books and sculptures on three of the leading lights of Imagism – Pound, Richard Aldington and Hilda Doolittle (it was Aldington who had published her war poem ‘After the Retreat’ in a special Imagist edition of the Egoist in 1915). The impression was that of a woman who had ceased to develop after her frantic espousal of the ...”

“... to Macbeth, Caesar to Brutus. Greenblatt adds to these the ghosts who appear in dreams, notably in Richard III; but I think this is a red herring, as is his introduction of the nightmares of German Jews at the coming to power of Hitler – a rare case, here, of the presentism which has been a worry in Greenblatt’s other works. So to Hamlet, and ‘Remember ...”

“... her recollection of works by Marco Evaristti, Cornelia Parker, Vito Acconci (this is a book to be read with Wikipedia open beside you); it has a list of artworks at the back – a glossary of the mental museum Frankie carries around. ‘Now that I am no longer a student of any kind,’ she tells us, ‘I must take responsibility for the furniture inside my ...”

“... good or even brilliant in terms of historiography) falls into three camps: the conservative right (Richard Pipes), neoliberal right (Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder) or the cravenly apolitical centre (Timothy Colton). They all treat Russia as a problem to be solved. What is the underlying reason, they ask, for Russia’s deviance from the ‘normal’ (...”

“... in an 18th-century house, brought up, truth to tell, in the 18th century.’ He went to Eton and read English at Cambridge, where he met Nick Tomalin, Hugh Thomas, Mark Boxer and Neal Ascherson. Among the enduring friendships of his student years was that of the founding editor of the LRB, Karl Miller. McEwen and his wife, Romana, later went on a road trip ...”