“... since then in electronics and computing power, and the black market in weapons-grade plutonium, may not have made it as easy now as many people, including Cathcart, fear. On the test itself, a combined operation of nightmarish difficulty at a site only marginally preferable to Piccadilly Circus, Cathcart actually outdoes his mistresses. And across it all ...”

“... of biographies and autobiographies, Wagner-Martin worries that ‘choosing to write about a woman may not be the way to literary success: women usually lead lives that seem less interesting to readers.’ Such sweeping claims may have held true for an older generation. Carolyn Heilbrun recalls in the late Thirties and early ...”

“... has been addressed to the Standard by Lord Salisbury’s House Steward. The Editor of the Standard may, perhaps, be allowed to add that he is not much in the habit of receiving telegraphic instructions from House Stewards; not even when they are in the household of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. That was fully up to the level of prickliness ...”

“... of his behaviour rather than his age. Nor is it always the part of youth to be the wild ones. They may come on strong for discipline, reversing decadent trends, restraining reckless middle age. The novelty of 19th-century generationalism lay in a new self-consciousness about generational differences, and a desire to discover in them some historical ...”

“... 22/1 BC) belong to the correspondence of two army trumpeters. But on 11 March 1978 the excavator, Robert Anderson, found himself looking at something quite different: five tattered scraps, with elegant Latin capitals. Individual words stood out: CAESAR was interesting. LYCOAL was sensational. Only one Lycoris occurs in Latin literature: she was the ...”

“... novel, being shorter, darker and less furiously though still adequately inventive. Its economy may shock some folk, for Peter Carey is known to be an exuberant novelist, copious, various and fantastic. It is possible to admire his books for their lack of respect for boundaries, for the qualities they share with the work of modern Latin American ...”

“... men who learned Talbot’s process and used it: the brilliant Scottish portraitists D.O. Hill and Robert Adamson, with their studies of Newhaven fisherfolk, the rather less gifted Rev. Calvert Jones, the Frenchman Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, who, though trained in chemistry, had to learn the elements of photography from a Lille chemist said to have ...”

“... a fog of grappa and obsession, Lynch sets about befriending ugly Anna, while suspecting that she may be in cahoots with her mother, the blonde contessa, and possibly also with the rival art historian. In a leather trunk covered with dust, concealed in a hidden room in Mawle House (don’t groan: the art-hunt novel is a sub-species of Gothic, in which the ...”

“... 21st-century version of Aristotle’s Poetics – and for that matter of Cicero’s On the Orator, Robert McKee’s Story, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the entire works of Syd Field, and just about every other book ever written that pretends to reveal the ways fiction, drama or poetry ‘work’ – is tvtropes.org, the self-described ...”

“... Chesterton knew that it was only by loving and serving God through his Church that perfect freedom may be found, so it was inevitable that in the cause of Liberty he also became a defender of the Faith ... The understanding of this seeming paradox must be the chief concern of any biography of Chesterton, for the expounding of it was the chief concern of his ...”

“... the grateful monarch would abdicate in his favour, can only be attributed to plain lunacy. Robert Darnton reports on the autobiography of an itinerant glazier, born in Paris in 1738, a low-life Lovelace who outstrips all the window cleaner/travelling salesman jokes with his 64 seductions. If Jacques Ménétra is so extensively successful that he seems ...”

“... out of London. In his journal, written on the empty pages of an old bankbook, he notes that on 23 May 1826 he walked to school: ‘Old Monk drinks like a fish.’ At 14 he feels it is ‘high time for me to be learning some trade or profession’, and at 15 he is alone at his father’s deathbed, holding ‘the cold clammy hand’. At 16 he ships for ...”

“... Cromwell gets 21 lines to himself plus a separate entry under Tudor Revolution in Government. This may indicate the administrative path to editorial favour, for A.V. Dicey’s academic writings on the 19th century state are rewarded with an entry of nine lines, the same as Lord John Russell who was merely in office at the time. This is three lines less than ...”

“... in which the corn negates the seed and so on, is owed directly or indirectly to him. All that may be thrown away, and only the demands of religious observance could want it kept. But along with it, logicians and their natural philosophical allies characteristically throw out an entire dimension of social, political and psychological thought: a dimension ...”

“... be). One of the things you might have to discover is that some virtues are against the grain: it may not feel real to you to say sorry, or to be grateful, for example.The upshot of all this is that adults who look after adolescents have both to want them to behave badly, and to try and stop them; and to be able to do this the adults have to enjoy having ...”