“... Hamlet marks the point of transition to the new dynamics of the reign of James. As the Prince increasingly uses the terms employed by artisans and the lower orders, he seems to commit himself to a language learned from the politically voiceless, and thus to become their mouthpiece. To the Court this signifies madness.Madness of a ...”

“... found success outside it: J.G. Ballard as an author of realist novels, Samuel Delany in academia, William Gibson, Lethem himself (whose first books owed a lot to Dick). The sciences – biomedical sciences, climatology, ecology, information technology – seem omnipresent now. It should surprise no one that at least one writer who spent most of his life in SF ...”

“... compiling lists, but the lists themselves are interesting. For example: Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, James Wong Howe, Dudley Nichols, Clifford Odets, Robert Rossen, John Garfield, Charlie Chaplin and Leo McCarey all attended a reception in July 1943 for the Soviet director and administrator Mikhail Kalatozov. At that time Russian and American propaganda methods ...”

“... or not this bit of gossip is true, that ending would have fitted the epic sweep of the movie. But James Harvey found the happy ending a relief: ‘Sensible people don’t kill or maim each other for revenge or honour or empty matters of pride.’† And for Pippin the happy ending fits because the film was not really an epic to begin with: Dunson’s cattle ...”

“... to YouTube to revisit the recent royal wedding, and the communal singing of a peculiar poem by William Blake that has gained national anthem status. It was not much thought of until it acquired a splendid musical setting, an inspired piece of bombast by Sir Hubert Parry; ever since, the English have much enjoyed noisily pledging that they will not cease ...”

“... produced last January by a small number of ‘hand-picked’ analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. The claims of the last were made with only ‘moderate’ confidence. The label Intelligence Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of ...”

“... places and some landowners became infamous for their feats of coercion: the China opium magnate James Matheson gave more than 2300 men, women and children the choice between staying on Lewis and starving or boarding the emigrant ships to Canada. But what distinguished these operations was more the scale than the method, which had been employed for decades ...”

“... horse, Babieca, or Bauieca, which first appears in the Poema, seems to have been borrowed from William of Orange’s horse, Bauçan.At the time of Rodrigo’s birth, political unity had disintegrated across Andalusia with the fall of the Umayyad caliphate of Córdoba in 1031. Its collapse left a patchwork of principalities called taifas, or ...”

“... predecessor is lost – the first ever detective story or civilised thriller. The drama critic James Agate, who once savagely described Donald Wolfit’s Hamlet as a private detective watching the jewels at the Claudius-Gertrude wedding feast, may have said more than he knew. Yet to praise Hamlet as the first detective story makes sense mainly in terms of ...”

“... accepted as genuine by Robert Sherard, Wilde’s first biographer; some of them are now in the William Andrews Clark Library in Los Angeles. A book collector named Herbert Boyce Satcher met Hope in New York in 1919; he described him as ‘a strange sort of vagrant poet’, who wrote refined verses ‘completely at variance with his character’. His ...”

“... Sofia Andrukhovych, Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia Andrukhovychtranslated by Uilleam BlackerOn​  the first day, we hid in the Mins’ka metro station with our dog, Zlata ...”

“... Rex Ingram’s The Magician (1926), drawn from a Maugham novel, mysteriously incorporated into the James Whale Frankenstein and subsequently acquiring the generic name of Igor – by his grudging response to one of the few occasions when a disability materialises as an aspect of the hero. Howard Breslin’s short story ‘Bad Day at Honda’ has an explicitly ...”

“... Road had previously been occupied by an American draft-decliner and notorious non-inhaler, William Jefferson Clinton. It’s tempting to compare the parallel careers of these two men, both conservative liberals, advocates of small freedoms. Men of the Sixties. Charismatic hustlers with an eye for a deal. Provincials trading on cracker-barrel ...”

“... Yet he was also the natural outsider in a scene that as well as Britten (born 1913), included William Walton (1902) and Lennox Berkeley (1903), with the reassuring presence of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872) hovering over them all. Whether Tippett ever entered the pantheon, or even deserves to, remains an open question for some. His Concerto for Double ...”

“... the original. The Garnett version, however, is so utterly unobtrusive as to deserve the plaudit of William Weaver, our senior living translator, who prefaces his translation of Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller with this note: ‘In Chapter Eight the passage from Crime and Punishment is quoted in the beloved translation of Constance ...”