“... By the time we got back from the pub, Kerry had lost. The politics nerd is showing signs that he may be going to stop teasing me quite soon. I blame the blogs. Specifically, for getting my hopes up in the first place, I blame electoral-vote.com, which had an interactive map of poll results arranged state by state, and mysterypollster.com. (The mystery ...”

“... gave him some problems after the war. He was denied a visa to enter the United States in May 1955, at the height of the anti-Communist hysteria. (The public rebuke came just as Oppenheimer was being interrogated by the Atomic Energy Commission’s personnel security board, although Oppenheimer’s case was secret at the time.) Nearly two decades ...”

“... guns to the platform on the flying bridge of the ship. Writing as Ryko, the hard-drinking, devil-may-care merchant seaman, liberates Kerouac’s sense of humour, which is good-natured, almost puppy-like, especially when compared with Burroughs’s relentlessly sardonic deadpan. He is particularly amusing in the scenes with Ryko and his ...”

“... mixture of Latin, Italianised and Anglicised toponyms. Classicists and ancient history buffs, who may hitherto have found the world of late antiquity too exotically un-classical to consider, will be in for an agreeable surprise: Traina’s fifth century should seem just familiar enough to navigate easily, but also enough of a trial run for the Middle Ages to ...”

“... a brilliant tour de force, in which two dystopias and a utopia were ingeniously intertwined. What may now surprise us is that Atwood has decided to go on living in that universe, which, however, did not have a to-be-continued sign attached to it. The wonderful cliffhanger of the earlier novel is thereby somewhat spoiled (we need a technical term for this ...”

“... of physical powers, above all the power of desire. Yet from the inside the same development may bear a quite different interpretation: as a liberation, a clearing of the mind to take on more important tasks. He goes on to discuss the classic example, Tolstoy, and his supposed decline from the panoramic vitality of War and Peace to the ‘aridity of the ...”

“... the traditional attitude of the common law to the executive’. Traditional it may have been, but by Holdsworth’s day the judges had fallen into a complaisant doze in relation to the state’s powers, repeatedly deferring to a civil service now led by a mandarin class drawn largely from the same schools, universities and clubs as the ...”

“... her memoir she writes: ‘All dope can do is kill you – kill you the long slow way.’ Holiday may have lost her way; but she never lost her audience. ‘I’ve always been fortunate as far as the public is concerned. I could kill myself if it wasn’t for them.’ Lady Sings the Blues was written three years before Holiday died. Apart from the pitch and ...”

“... a restlessness about them, the relentless unseriousness of the classroom joker. A spy thriller may seem very different territory from her previous shows, domestic comedies which delighted in the everyday oddities and hypocrisies encountered by her young female protagonists. But it isn’t tradecraft and global criminal machinations that interest her so ...”

“... declared, people would undoubtedly address a boy wearing such a jacket as ‘Buttons’. He may well have been thinking of Buttons the page in the pantomime version of Cinderella. In America, too, the pages or ‘call boys’ whose instant availability was crucial to the smooth functioning of office block, luxury hotel and legislative chamber alike ...”

“... names – their dim faces snuffed flames. A poet who could write such lines so early, in what may have been good health, didn’t have to change her style much (though she tried, by writing prose poems) when she, or her parents, got sick. Nor did she have to learn from scratch about midlife: another poem from Wild Brides proposes To go to the door of the ...”

“... man, less cocksure and more wary, wanting to do some good and make a difference, but afraid it may be too late. The Friends of Harry Perkins traces his rise from the backbenches to the brink of Downing Street. The time frame for this is deliberately confusing. As Mullin tells us in his preface, the new book is set in a future that overlaps with the recent ...”

“... But perhaps there is something in the Balkan water, or the Balkan genes, because, even though it may have got there by itself, a Lleshanaku poem will be a welcome and familiar thing to a reader of Herbert or Szymborska. It seems almost like an experimental object, a child’s poem, or a poem in a state of nature; life synthesised from carbon, hydrogen and ...”

“... Doom fashioned himself ‘the rocket scientist with the pocket wine list’, and although he may be done conducting his mysterious experiments, I refuse to believe the song is over. His ‘transition’ is just another ‘biochemical equation’ (the title of a song he made with Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA). He will reconstitute in some other form, just as he ...”

“... the first two books. These characters tend to be men, and they’re frequently misogynists. They may never share a page, much less a room.But they cover a lot of ground. Across three fragments appearing over thirty pages in Nocilla Experience, a doctor called Harold, who has suffered a breakdown after a divorce, spends three and a half years losing at tennis ...”