“... of France. Now the Foreign Office needs to know whether he or the other man was the traitor, and Simon Milson is dispatched to holiday at the suspect’s villa and plumb him. Arrived there, both Milson and the novel itself are sharply and guardedly observant, and if the book is spare, it is spare as an animal on the scent would need to be, taking ...”

“... his books and they didn’t care for themselves in them. His elder brother, Maury (the basis for Simon in The Adventures of Augie March, Julius in Humboldt’s Gift, Shura in Herzog, and at least two other characters), was a liberty-taking, criminally minded businessman who loved his bookish brother but thought him a waste of space, not a success in the way ...”

“... by two of the century’s most ruthless and insouciant planners, Lenin and Stalin. ‘Stalin,’ Simon Clarke writes in the collection of neo-Marxist essays about the whirlwind which has hit Soviet workers, sought to overcome the economic weakness of his regime by expanding heavy industry as rapidly as possible. He sought to broaden the social base of his ...”

“... hard and shamelessly for reinstatement ... [who] crawled back into office ... ’ Sir John Simon and Sir Robert Vansittart are described in similar terms, but the worst treatment of all is reserved for Sir Anthony Nutting. In his introduction to the new edition of The Suez Affair, Hugh Thomas describes Sir Anthony as ‘the one man who conducted ...”

“... liked to be comfortable,’ Arthur wrote, ‘but didn’t know how … his fear of waste was so strong.’ In this Edward was an authentic product of King Edward’s School in Birmingham, and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of ...”

“... assumptions of … politicised history’ (the editors again) but, it sometimes seems, against strong arguments of any kind. Emma Griffin examines the transformation of civic marketplaces to conclude that claims of a Georgian ‘urban renaissance’ are not so much ‘wrong’ as ‘partial’; Joanna Innes cautions against drawing excessively bold ...”

“... Carroll, it was love at first sight, but the infatuation was short-lived: humour was not Duras’s strong point. She laughed a lot, it is true, but never at herself. The Donnadieu clan returned to France in the Thirties and MD casually embarked on a law degree. In the golden triangle of Montparnasse, Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter, she began to ...”

“... in response to what they saw as Protestant fundamentalism. As the French Oratorian scholar Richard Simon remarked early on in a book that became a subversive classic among Catholics and Protestants alike, ‘the Books of the Bible that are come into our hands are but abridgments of the ancient Records, which were more full and copious, before the last ...”

“... LRB (29 July 1990): ‘fierce and comic, formidable and vulnerable, urchin-like and waif-like, a strong head and torso with comparatively frail-looking breakable legs, strange-eyed, pink-faced, fair-haired, tense and upright, a priapic monolith in the Mediterranean sun’. Without Hamilton and Miller, no Wilson (or, you suspect, the journalists Barney Ronay ...”

“... woman’s hair – while the tonic green appears in two versions, jade and a yellowish pea-green, strong and weak, at the top and bottom of the picture. Some of the paintings are riots, you don’t know where to look – the triptych called The Beginning, the nightmarish fascist scene called Bird’s Hell – but most operate powerfully with reduced ...”

“... pluralism, but this apparently organic mutation from one strain to another was also the fruit of a strong business pressure for European integration. And the final shift of power wasn’t as peaceful and evolutionary as all that, if the weight of Portugal’s African wars and the Greek colonels’ expedition to Cyprus is left in the scale. Adam Michnik, quite ...”

“... of which offers a probing account of the historical context while the second is informed by a strong theory of how language interacts with social frameworks and individual experience. The time of revolution referred to in the book’s title is that following the wave of pogroms in Russia in 1881, when large numbers of Jews in Eastern and Central Europe ...”

“... to exist on page one. In the preceding xxxiv pages, in which a Preface mysteriously signed by ‘Simon Volkov’ is topped by an Introduction ‘by Solomon Volkov’ (is the editor practising metamorphosis?), he writes about Shostakovich. But from the opening sentences of Chapter One, he turns into Shostakovich – or rather, he turns Shostakovich into ...”

“... look reveals some strikingly un-Durkheimian preoccupations. For a start, there is no sign that the strong move away from prioritising ‘polis religion’ is slowing. Twenty years ago, Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood held that archaic and classical religion was primarily an expression of the collective values of the city-state (or polis), making religion the sum ...”

“... cast of characters including three skeletons, 15 aardvarks, Quasimodo, Vinnie the Venus Fly Trap, Simon the Sundew and Pete the Pitcher plant. In my story, an old sofa that had been dumped beneath a tree became the aardvarks’ bed. The sofa has now been taken away by the police for DNA samples. I shall never tell a ravine story again. Housing estates have ...”