“... Soviet troops crossed the boundaries of pre-1939 Germany, and the atrocities they committed helped steel the resolve of the defenders. When the Germans retook the East Prussian village of Nemmersdorf they found dozens of bodies of women and children who had been murdered in the most gruesome ways. In the months that followed, Soviet forces killed or violated ...”

“... only half the story. The other half concerns the Liberal Party and in particular the role of David Steel. It may not be true that Jenkins was dissuaded from joining the Liberal Party by Steel, but plainly the two men were working together from the Brussels days onward to create a new opening on the centre-left. The Alliance ...”

“... back, cow-eyed and alabaster-browed. The actual text is 1079 tiny-printed pages long. ‘Who is John Galt?’ the novel begins: the question is rhetorical, an expression of despair. The setting is, loosely, America in the 1940s – Washington, Wisconsin, Mexico are mentioned, as are diners, bums, hamburgers, negligees – but film-set-thin and vague and ...”

“... before telling me I was the latest visitor in a tradition of literary visitors stretching back to John Milton. He said it very kindly, but I wanted to laugh. However, something high in his red cheeks warned me neither to laugh nor to make any reference to Paradise Lost. I simply smiled and composed my wits and followed him over the black and claret tiles to ...”

“... crescent of Michael Searles’s Paragon – and while Dulwich is less monumental, it does have John Soane’s Picture Gallery and the buildings of Dulwich College, ranging from mannered Georgian to Barry’s lurid neo-Gothic, with the remnants of the Crystal Palace nearby and the bizarre tower of Charles Townsend’s Horniman Museum overlooking it ...”

“... been international waters. Icelandic gunboats towing net cutters would slice through the steel cables British trawlers used to drag their nets behind them, while Royal Navy frigates tried to keep the gunboats away. Hardie was fishing with a group of twenty trawlers one afternoon, dragging his nets at the standard three and a half knots, when a ...”

“... with a suicide. Into these wavering constructions, Carter inserts explicit statements, like the steel rods in skyscrapers. It was a habit she fell in and out of, depending on the weight of programme in each book. Her last two novels, Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991), are relatively free-standing. But in Shadow Dance, it is surely a ...”

“... One​ of the prized possessions in Margaret Busby’s childhood home in Ghana was a steel-grey transistor radio. For much of the year she and her siblings attended boarding school in England, but during the holidays the radio connected her to ‘other cultures, other musics’. In an essay written for the Radio 3 programme Free Thinking in 2008, now reprinted as ‘The Joy of Radio’ in Part of the Story, a collection of Busby’s writings from the 1960s onwards, she recalls what happened when the radio broke ...”

“... of the term, slotting it between ‘guilty quotation marks’ throughout the issue. Designed by John Piper (with whom Myfanwy was living at Fawley Bottom, a rundown farmhouse in Oxfordshire), Axis was crisp and modern, with sans-serif lettering and experimental prose. But Myfanwy’s refusal to pin down abstraction infuriated the artists. In what Maclean ...”

“... The dust jacket of the final volume of Bevis Hillier’s epic life of John Betjeman shows the poet laureate seized by giggles. In this lengthy coda to Hillier’s authorised biography Betjeman appears in many lights, but he’s rarely carefree. ‘Nothing frightens me more than the thought of dying,’ he told a friend in 1958 ...”

“... sectoral heights of the economy – notably energy, communications, transport, and iron and steel. And it is astonishing to recall, as John Redwood does in Public Enterprise in Crisis, the bright hopes that attended their births. They were to advance social and economic equity, enhance efficiency and actually prevent ...”

“... the effect as Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, and reports from sufferers abounded. The following year John Olney of Washington University set out to confirm these findings under laboratory conditions. His experiment involved injecting newborn mice with monosodium glutamate, and the results were alarming: the effects on the mice culminated in acute neural necrosis ...”

“... to be taken seriously and relying on a single performance by Jo Grimond, Jeremy Thorpe or David Steel to give them whatever credibility they could earn. It was Labour that faced the real problem. Defeat for the leadership – often following a bitter row – saddled it with policies unacceptable to its own MPs and profoundly unattractive to the public. In ...”

“... successfully – most recently in a triumphant Broadway True West, with Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly alternating the two main roles – and last year also saw the publication of the very useful Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard.* But his later plays have often seemed clotted, hyper-masculine, forced, and his ventures into movie direction – Far ...”

“... both are made by the individual, who puts himself into them, puts in his ‘life illusion’, as John Cowper Powys called it, his unconscious fears and desires. History will not work without fiction, or at least the fictive principle, which Scott renounced as far as he could. This of course amounts to choosing a principle of another kind, but a negative ...”