“... of four-bar phrases tacked onto other four-bar phrases to which they bear no relationship’. This may be true but it misses the point. Prokofiev comes across as a traditionalist in an age of sordid licentiousness. Even when he indulged the sordid, as in his ballet Chout, he was outmanoeuvred. It was dropped from the repertoire of the Ballets Russes in favour ...”

“... him that there was ‘one unassailable certainty: Greater Germany’s victory in this war’. In May 1945, with the Russians already in Berlin, Franz – wounded and on home leave – is wondering when the ‘Miracle Weapons’ will finally be launched to turn the tide. The Führer seems to be leaving it rather late. But that is probably because he has ...”

“... gap towards the end. After all the achievements, the marriages, the medals and the anecdotes there may be a decade or more unaccounted for before the date of death. Speculating on what might have filled it Miller lists the terrors of old age, the modern four last things that have replaced death, judgment, heaven and ...”

“... and seemingly interminable slog that is required to build up to any revolution’s launch: it may take years, even decades, once the match is lit, for it to ignite a mobilisation large enough to create a truly national initiative. One of the individuals who still keeps the revolutionary spirit alive in these bleak times phoned me this week, and this time ...”

“... to slide. A £250,000 loss was made on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Aldous Huxley, who visited in May 1931 for Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, noted that Britain, once an iron-making pioneer, had long since been overtaken. Bolckow Vaughan had collapsed into Dorman Long in the 1920s, Dorman Long was nationalised to become part of British Steel in 1967, British ...”

“... to do with snowmobiles, the ungainliness of extreme cold weather clothing, Beard’s fear that he may have lost his penis to frostbite after pulling over to relieve himself in temperatures well below zero, and his refusal ever to ask anyone for help. It’s all a lot funnier than a summary makes it sound: McEwan’s jokes are shaggy-dog stories rather than ...”

“... several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible.’ We may think, as Nabokov was pretty certainly thinking, of the scene in Pnin where our hero, about to give a lecture, briefly sees, instead of his actual audience, ‘one of his Baltic aunts’, ‘a dead sweetheart’, his dead parents, ‘both a little blurred but ...”

“... or America. But it was not so. The Kyrgyz people quite simply lost their patience.’ The reality may be a little more complicated than Otunbaeva’s response suggests. The Putin-Medvedev duo certainly seems tacitly to have supported the shift of power and has been quick to endorse the interim government. Putin’s terse observation on 8 April that ...”

“... tells inevitably allows Augustus some of his traditional agency, as well as his pivotal status. We may not want to perpetuate Syme’s world-weariness, but any bottom-up treatment of Roman culture and politics will reach its limits trying to account for a society in which, even at best, the ideals of Athenian democracy tended to get a little lost in ...”

“... theory, stipulates a trade-off between how precisely a quantum object’s position and momentum may be specified. In other words, nothing – not even gluons – can force quarks to sit perfectly still in a fixed location. The more gluons act to keep the new quarks fixed squarely on top of the original one, the more energetically those quarks jump ...”

“... in French. The London puy shows no signs of having survived into Chaucer’s lifetime, but it may still have offered a model for the storytelling competition of The Canterbury Tales. Butterfield suggests too that these societies offer a context for the poetic exchanges between a number of late 14th-century French poets, perhaps extending as far as ...”

“... J. Edgar Hoover, who headed the FBI for 48 years between 1924 and his unexpected death on 2 May 1972. For decades before Watergate every president came into office determined to usher Hoover into retirement; on every occasion Hoover was able to convey that he held materials in the FBI files that could damage the new president, and that he could only ...”

“... let the man sit by a good fire and make him drink of the potion until he falls asleep. Then he may safely be operated upon.’ This concoction would have been very dangerous if made up wrongly: herbalism was and is still bedevilled by the difficulty of estimating the strength of its constituents. The levels of pharmacologically active substance in herbal ...”

“... I don’t mean some cosy idea of multiculturalism and human togetherness. Opportunistic secularism may have run out of steam, but if the BJP thinks it knows what to replace it with, it’s mistaken. For the first time since Independence, India feels unliveable in, not just for minorities under assault but for large swathes of the population. The BJP is a ...”

“... her first novel). One of the reasons for the success of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train may be that they make violence not just compelling, like any horror story, nor just manageable, like detective stories (which always reassure us that the worst will finally be contained by the law), but digestible, a bit like consuming a TV dinner, legs ...”