“... lounge.) In addition to all this, there is an apparently unending succession of books, of which Simon Callow’s ongoing biography is the most monumental, now two volumes in and not even arrived at The Third Man, the 1949 movie that made Welles a myth. Callow’s second volume, Hello Americans, is named after the series of radio broadcasts Welles delivered ...”

“... for them. As lovers they are inept, incapable of communicating human warmth. Their prototype is John Coetzee, the subject of Summertime (2009), the third in Coetzee’s triptych of ‘autobiographical’ novels. Its metafictional conceit is that Coetzee has died and a biographer, writing about him in the 1970s when he was still making his way as a ...”

“... of Herbert Spencer and F.A. Hayek, and the technological optimism of Herman Kahn or Julian Simon, post-scarcity anarchism asserts that, given existing and prospective technologies, there are no insuperable natural limitations to the growth of human population, and no forms of scarcity that cannot be overcome by scientific innovation and institutional ...”

“... the bureaucratic compilers of the Report against whom these reproaches are made. To a man, Julian Simon’s independent team of scientists challenge them for the assurance with which they create their mirage of certain doom and offer their own reassuring, though by no means complacent assessments of the world environmental situation. Besides using additional ...”

“... case. In the next frame they are looking at the sea. The brothers are Eli and Charlie, played by John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix. Reilly is also the producer of the work, having seen in DeWitt’s novel a starting point for the film. The screenplay is by Audiard and Thomas Bidegain. The performances of Reilly and Phoenix are amazing, and lead us back to ...”

“... references to Conrad (Joseph), Hesiod, Rilke, Shakespeare, Plato, Mann, George Eliot, Gide and St John. Quite how much Conrad may be coruscating on thin ice here and there is a question the book can’t help posing, as do the works of his fellow polymath and mandarin critic of modernity, George Steiner. Yet the intellectual unity of the volume is ...”

“... and opportunity. There is plurality in plenty, and not merely of a superficial sort, in Simon Armitage’s Kid. It is a varied, versatile collection, showing considerable facility in its rhythmic variations and in its generation of often surprising feminine and half-rhymes. Armitage maps a degraded Post-Modern landscape, where the seedy can tip into ...”

“... of Britain. It does for public sculpture (but not sculpture inside churches or galleries) what Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner do for the buildings the sculpture is on (or near) in The Buildings of England volume on The City of London. In a way it does more. While buildings have to be interesting in themselves to get into Pevsner, Ward-Jackson can put ...”

“... recently with a Cabinet Minister will know that it is not just the labourer who is thus incapable. John Buchan, whose grandson I am, was a late and flesh-and-blood representative of that lost epoch before economic expediency: a writer who not so much rejected the division of labour (Baudelaire and the Romantics do that) as overcame it. He fascinated his age ...”

“... wouldn’t matter to anyone now if it didn’t show up in the Bond books, but of course it does. Simon Winder, the editor responsible for republishing all the novels (and for cheekily bringing out three of them as a Penguin Classic) has said simply and robustly that Fleming was a sado-masochist. This is a sensible way of dealing with the profoundly ...”

“... on a totally different level, shared the uncertainty and hesitations of the rest of the Party. Simon Clarke, in a bitterly hostile account of Althusserian Marxism, recounts what he chooses to call its ‘sordid history’. He suggests that when Althusser undertook the important and radical task of counterposing Marx’s authority to that of the Party ...”

“... which was fully as lurid and preposterous as its title (put out by the ‘respected firm’ of Simon and Schuster) might suggest. Its central allegation was that an old personal enemy of mine had been a key ‘agent of influence’ in Reagan-era Washington. I could believe anything of this man except that his ‘controllers’ had awarded him the hilarious ...”

“... document the biography. Once the book appeared, it was given short shrift in eminent quarters. Sir John Pope-Hennessy, writing in the life-enhancing Now!, described it as ‘tawdry’, while working up a tremendous lather of indignation at the impertinence of the whole enterprise. Professor Sidney Freedberg availed himself of the Boston Globe to lay about the ...”

“... the brain. This is what has come to be known as brain organisation theory, a concept pioneered by John Money in the 1960s. It is currently the leading explanation for the essential difference between men and women. The real world question, however, still goes back to Aristotle: do such differences legitimately naturalise the different places in which men and ...”

“... area of social dereliction. None could have gained their 19th-century flavour without coal. John Shaw’s book is a careful reference work of value to all in research on local economic development or on particular industries. It has a sound appreciation of early technology. Its maps show the concentration of Scottish industry in the early days of ...”