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“... the (increasingly elderly?) fans who clamber from their charabancs for matinée productions of Major Barbara or The Doctor’s Dilemma have more cause to be grateful to GBS than they know. After all, thanks to the existence of public lavatories for women, the fans can settle back for two or three hours of facile paradox and wholly unmemorable epigram, safe ...”

“... by not moving. He remains upright amid the ruins of a Keynesian political economy while the two major parties quarrel over possession of the new orthodoxy. He has also written one of the best things on Thatcherism: Dancing with Dogma (1992), a book which will demonstrate to a later generation that not all Conservative politicians took leave of their senses ...”

“... Then we found out what the modernists were rebelling against.’ Eugenides studied at Brown with John Hawkes and at Stanford with Gilbert Sorrentino, exacting experimentalists who were ‘against order on the whole and against storytelling’. By setting much of his new novel at Brown in the early 1980s, Eugenides returns to the time of the fall; by ...”

“... and Hispanic voters to turn out in unprecedented numbers. He did better among white voters than John Kerry had in 2004, but not by much: Kerry got 41 per cent, Obama 43 per cent. The brunt of the recession has been borne by precisely those groups that supported Obama most: blacks, Hispanics and the young. (In 2008, the 18-29 age group, which usually ...”

“... with a powerful editorial board and a team of learned commentators. One volume apiece goes to the major novels – Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which originally appeared in a single posthumous volume, are here divided. Later Manuscripts, the last to appear and the largest volume of ...”

“... in Italy until the middle of the 16th century. It is difficult to think of any other instance of a major portraitist repeating himself quite so literally, and seemingly within a period of no more than about three years. The portrait of Arsilli was certainly seen by Michelangelo in Sebastiano’s house, and he would surely not have been happy to discover either ...”

“... led to several investigations into an alleged shoot to kill policy, the most notable headed by John Stalker, then deputy chief constable of Manchester. Stalker’s inquiry was continually obstructed by elements within the RUC and he was eventually, and very controversially, dismissed from the police. The findings of his inquiry were never published. ‘I ...”

“... war broke out, Cantos 52 to 71, known to initiates as the Chinese History Cantos followed by the John Adams Cantos, seem to him as to many of us wrongly conceived as well as sloppily executed. His dislike of them takes a special turn, however, when for the failure of the Adams sequence he blames John Adams, not ...”

“... was intertwined with his. It would be helpful to have explanations of Lucy Porter, Hill Boothby, John Taylor and the Thrales, as major figures in Johnson’s life and letter-writing. The notes are self-referential in a cryptic way, with a delicately archaic use of ante and post; these are not as helpful as the editor ...”

“... an unmistakable resemblance to Coward. Hall’s heroine Stephen Gordon (Radclyffe Hall was called John for most of her adult life) knows that Brockett, a playwright with soft white hands and an effeminate voice, is a man ‘who would never require more of her than she could give’. When they visit Versailles together he talks to her about Marie Antoinette ...”

“... by P.W. Botha, who has since become prime minister of South Africa.Botha’s committee drew up major proposals for constitutional reform which have been endorsed both by the Cabinet and by the four provincial congresses of the National Party, whose structure and importance are discussed in a fascinating chapter on Afrikanerpolitics, ‘How the system ...”

“... with the publication in 2003 of its magisterial sixth volume, written by the general editor, John Baker, and covering the years 1483-1558. It then went back to the beginning, with R.H. Helmholz’s opening volume on early canon law. The rest was silence, until in 2010 the series sailed suddenly and magnificently into port without any of the remaining ...”

“... magazine Alpha publishes estimates of top individual earnings. The 2007 list was headed by John Paulson of Paulson & Co., who earned $3.7 billion by betting that the value of securities backed by US sub-prime mortgages would collapse. He was followed by George Soros ($2.9 billion) and James Simons ($2.8 billion). These are figures far beyond even the ...”

“... his most gruesome details yet, including the murder of two and three-year-olds. This time the major media finally paid attention: Meadlo appeared on the CBS news programme 60 Minutes and A.M. Rosenthal of the New York Times phoned Hersh twice to ask if he could get him an interview with Meadlo. Hersh hung up twice. Starting a book on My Lai, with Meadlo ...”

“... shows that from the moment the US entered the war, the treatment of Blacks in the military was a major source of controversy. The Black press demanded the integration of the armed forces. Military commanders strongly resisted, claiming that white soldiers would resent being in close proximity to Blacks. At a meeting of Black editors with War Department ...”