“... read about the murder that week, on the day he finished a biography of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, Emmanuel Carrère, writer, père de famille, and Romand’s contemporary, finally decided that the only person who could answer the questions that had begun to trouble him was Romand himself. Six months after the murders he wrote to Romand in ...”

“... an adopted religion into his writing. Heading to California, he backpacks with Zen companions Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder, but only gets drunker and lonelier and unhappier. When last we see him, he is typing up grandiose autodidactic meditation manuals and ‘spiritual bromide’ sutras in a rustic cabin in thought-free California, victim of a fear of ...”

“... including Bethe. When Bethe himself was put to the test by an assault on his Cornell colleague, Philip Morrison, he sprang to Morrison’s defence, though it was perhaps less daunting for Bethe to stand up to a university committee of inquiry than it was for Oppenheimer to face down the rampaging House Committee on Un-American Activities. And, while ...”

“... concealed inside an early Elizabethan ring which once belonged to Winston Churchill. It was Sir Philip Sidney who said (not with Anne in mind but her daughter), ‘she was a queen and therefore beautiful,’ and much diplomatic comment on her exquisite good looks can be dismissed along with the misattributed portraits. There seems little doubt that she had ...”

“... than a dozen speeches called the Philippics, after Demosthenes’ almost equally nasty attacks on Philip of Macedon, three centuries earlier. The chase had degenerated into an elaborate, occasionally comic game of hide-and-seek, with Cicero torn between holing up in his villa to wait for the inevitable knock on the door and making a speedy getaway by ...”

“... and gave her name to the modified milk bottle in which donated blood was stored. Another, Charles Drew, Columbia’s first African American medical graduate, built the infrastructure for plasma collection in the US for shipment to the various theatres of war. At a time when black blood was acceptable only when specifically labelled pint by pint, and was ...”

“... had Lincoln not been assassinated, or Bobby Kennedy – or more sombre fantasies, like Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, in which Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide the US between them. But these historical variants are not genuine time-travel narratives on the order of H.G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895), which ...”

“... reworked by later authors, the subject could also be approached as a history of reception. Philip Hardie’s impressively learned Celestial Aspirations touches on all these aspects, with an emphasis on reception history. As a Latinist, he is interested in the long afterlife of classical myths, themes and images of celestial ascent, and traces them ...”

“... included her aunt, Sarah Siddons, her father, Charles, and her uncle, the great tragedian John Philip Kemble, Fanny herself was deeply ambivalent towards the theatre. She first aspired to be a writer rather than an actress; and it was only when the family faced bankruptcy that the latest Kemble was swiftly prepared for the stage. As the manager and ...”

“... epic in the register of the humdrum, a tendency Heaney once neatly characterised by saying, ‘if Philip Larkin had ever composed his version of The Divine Comedy he would probably have discovered himself not in a dark wood but a railway tunnel halfway on a journey down England.’ That domestication of epic, in which allusions to heroic fictions at once give ...”

“... of coal and steel companies.) In comparison with these new structural fundamentals, as Philip Manow has pointed out, the influence of what is generally thought to have been the key economic doctrine in postwar Germany, the ‘ordoliberalism’ of the Freiburg School and its associates, a milder variant of the radical free-market theories of Hayek ...”

“... agents who marketed them. (The identity of its members remains unknown.)All of this activism drew strength from a larger cultural revival. Welsh publishing houses and record labels sprang up, along with Welsh bands, some achieving major national and international success. There was a renewed sense of cultural confidence, even when – or especially when ...”

“... they could not engage in autonomous acts: at this time Dean Rusk, one of the two men who drew the line through the middle of Korea in 1945, was calling China ‘a Slavic Manchukuo’. The publication of Khrushchev’s memoirs in 1971 seemed to clinch the Russian involvement. The memoirs state flatly that the Korean Communist leader Kim Il Sung came ...”

“... became clearer, and for some much harder to bear. One sad early case was the naturalist Philip Gosse, the father of Edmund Gosse, who was known in the 1850s as the bestselling author of The Aquarium, which started yet another popular craze – for keeping fish. Gosse was a devout member of the austere Nonconformist Plymouth Brethren. Just before On ...”

“... manifestations of the politics of immiseration. Nehru’s short-lived successor, Shastri, drew strength from the crisis of fresh hostilities with Pakistan in 1965. When he collapsed from a heart attack after completing the peace negotiations at Tashkent, it was to Nehru’s daughter that the equally-matched rivals turned for an amenable compromise ...”