“... or the magical or any such claptrap. I despise myths and legends and their ilk. I believe that Richard Dawkins does not go nearly far enough when he says that astrologers should be prosecuted for fraud. Instead, priests and imams and monks and rabbis from every religion should be thrown into prison, unless and until they can prove the truth of their ...”

“... bummer to say so, perhaps, but Schenkar offers some of the most searing and honest writing I’ve read about everything that can go wrong, psychologically speaking, in lesbian relationships, especially between two fiercely independent creative women. (Put The Talented Miss Highsmith on a short list with Marina Tsvetaeva’s Girlfriend Poems and Violette ...”

“... on the Austrian resistance; but he has done little else. Another account of the controversy – Richard Evans’s In Hitler’s Shadow – is better informed, and more perceptive. Professor Evans shows in abundantly documented detail how the arguments the embattled historians are advancing ‘are derived, consciously or unconsciously, from the propaganda of ...”

“... honour containing those – Hélène Carrière d’Encausse, Robert Conquest, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Pipes – who did see the fuse peeping out from the foundations and said as much. Indeed, a whole issue (Spring 1993) of the conservative US journal National Interest was largely devoted to a celebration of the Right’s greater prescience in perceiving ...”

“... church. A mile or so beyond looms a larger sight that Rodinsky was spared: the 52 floors of Richard Seifert’s Natwest Tower, double-decker lifts, automatic window-washing facilities and all. Here again was the characteristic frisson of the zone of transition, where different worlds rub up against one another, languages intersect on every corner and ...”

“... like this.’ But the paradoxical gusto and linguistic inventiveness of the writing (judging by Richard Lourie’s confident translation), and its rapid and always disconcerting shuffling of tones (lyrical, affectionate, snide, farcical, grumpy, bitter), manage to prevent our feeling as with André Brink that postures are being adopted in careful conformity ...”

“... exists to render the idea of competition redundant. Like so many others in Silicon Valley, Thiel read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as a young man and continues to pursue her ideal of the fearless businessman who is prepared to take no prisoners in creating something new. The condition of progress is to change the rules of the game. For that reason, Thiel ...”

“... This astonishing and brilliant revival of independence and creative energy is the subject of Richard Butterwick’s book. For Catherine, though, as for the Habsburg emperor and the Prussian king, this resurrection was insufferable. In 1795 the armies of all three tramped in to carry out the last of the late 18th-century partitions of the Commonwealth and ...”

“... Yoghurt? No. Pizza? Don’t be stupid. Keen’s cheddar? Perfect. Then I went upstairs and read Emmanuel Carrère’s biography of Philip K. Dick for half an hour or so.† Then I tried to sleep. There are quite a large number of books about how to get a good night’s sleep, and good ‘sleep hygiene’ in general, and not a single one of them ...”

“... proprietor of the small yet reliable magazine Antichrist. This Ravelston – some composite of Sir Richard Rees and John Middleton Murry – was a hedonistic yet guilt-ridden dilettante, good in a pinch, and soft on poets, but too easily embarrassed by brute exigence. Saul Bellow – who has already shown a vulnerability to exigent poets in his wonderful ...”

“... perhaps we are made in equal measure of what could have been and what is. Anyone who has read Marías will immediately recognise this highly rhetorical style, at once well-rehearsed and slightly distraught, from his novels, which also abound with catalogues of synonyms.* ‘What Does and Doesn’t Happen’ must be one of the great contemporary ...”

“... and cover a few boos, with a rendition of ‘Congratulations’, a song once sung by Cliff Richard to remind people that happiness is a feeling constantly under threat from the songs that celebrate it. ‘Beautiful white dress,’ the woman from the BBC said. ‘Hardly white,’ the person beside me said. ‘She’s got two huge children.’ ‘It ...”

“... nadir of postwar Britain. David Cameron (though it could just as easily have been Gordon Brown) read out the charge sheet at a Demos meeting in 2006: ‘economic decline . . . inflation, stagnation and rising unemployment . . . deteriorating industrial relations’. Nearly 30 million working days were lost to strikes in 1979, mainly during the Winter of ...”

“... and quickly took root in the public imagination. But it also set some eyes rolling. Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould were critical, and scientists across the board argued that Gaia smacked of teleology or even new-age mysticism. Can we really say a planet is an organism? What if life just evolves and there’s nothing that actually ...”

“... takes me aback by talking to me not about financial regulation but about having been assigned to read my book Relative Deprivation and Social Justice when he was an undergraduate. What, he asks, am I writing now? I tell him I have just published a long-gestated volume about the sociology of 20th-century England. What I don’t tell him is that it ...”