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“... Najibullah, the deposed Soviet-era President of Afghanistan, was working on a translation of Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game. Najibullah’s attempt to warn successive generations of the dangers of allowing Afghanistan to be used as a pawn by foreign powers was cut short, so the story goes, when the Taliban took Kabul, seized him, tortured him and ...”

“... intelligence that compensates for growing old. As Hercule Poirot had waxed moustaches, Lord Peter Wimsey collected first editions and Nero Wolfe wore yellow pyjamas, so Wexford is the sort of man who is always badly dressed and is never certain of having a clean handkerchief. Like Appleby, he has a tendency to quote from literature, but the detective ...”

“... one parents used to snatch from under pillows – has few defenders, although faced with bans on James Bond, or Forever Amber, or Ouida or Micky Spillane, children, intuitively doing the subversive thing, have on the whole managed to find a way of getting to read what they believed would most please them. The unending duels of the cartoon films – where Tom ...”

“... translation incorporated into a biography of Columbus written by his son. It was drawn on by Peter Martyr for his bestselling De orbe novo, which in turn was translated into English by Richard Eden, whose version formed one of the many texts metabolised in that alembic of metamorphic and ethnographic literatures, The Tempest. In a surprise move (the book ...”

“... In The Green Knight we have to contend with Lucas and Clement Graffe, Harvey Blacket, Bellamy James and his dog Anax, the Anderson women – Louise and her daughters Alethea (Aleph), Sophia (Sefton) and Moira (Moy) – Emil and Clive and the Adwardens. A reader alert to social differences will find such names far from neutral. An odour of class hangs ...”

“... his The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. has been reviewed in these pages, nor are Norman Stone, James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes always less fanciful. And if Hitler’s personality remains an unanswered question, so too, does the history of National Socialism – which a book like Robert Harbison’s recent Deliberate Regression: The disastrous ...”

“... about after the dazzlement is over. Brian Levack and Linda Levy Peck write about the reign of James I, a subject to which Professor Hexter returned recently with a devastating attack on the so-called ‘revisionists’: those who believe either that the English Civil War was an accident with no causes at all or that it was the product of aristocratic ...”

“... safe deposit boxes in Hatton Garden is not the first thing on people’s boo-hoo list. Commander Peter Spindler of the Metropolitan Police has been speaking about ‘this callous crime’. Meanwhile, the T-shirt vendors of Leather Lane are already mapping Reader’s well-worn features for bumper summer sales. My grandfather was in the minor league. An ...”

“... reflect that we have worse things to fear than banshees. But at the end of the last century M.R. James’s head lay easy, pillowed on Eton and King’s. In the introduction to this reissue, ‘Monty’s’ stories are made, by one of the Oxford Book editors, to look like a game which registers a displacement of the erotic. ‘Even the deepest friendship of ...”

“... the poem, as well as the Argo, is delayed by a long digresson on the origin of the Etesian winds. Peter Green, meanwhile, a historian of the Hellenistic world, has spent the best part of a decade producing his annotated translation and uses his excellent Introduction to zoom in on Apollonius’ use of the fantastic. All of them challenge the notion of the ...”

“... Ben Elliot. Starmer’s former chief of staff, Sam White, went to Flint Global, where his boss is James Purnell, who served as a minister under Gordon Brown. Flint claims to offer its clients – which include Meta, Amazon and Uber – ‘unparalleled insight into how Labour thinks and works’. The former home secretary Jacqui Smith was a specialist partner ...”

“... of straitened material circumstances outside it. ‘Henceforth,’ as Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming put it in their recent jeremiad Dead Man Working (Zero, £9.99), ‘our authenticity is no longer a retreat from the mandatory fakeness’ of the workplace, ‘but the very medium through which work squeezes the life out of us’. To guard against ...”

“... While admiring the work of retrieval that went into the Irish Academic Press’s recent edition of James Clarence Mangan, I was struck by the fact that a modern edition cannot reproduce the format in which many of his poems originally appeared. In his work for the Dublin University Magazine, the poems were gathered as mini-anthologies of translations which ...”

“... ale. I fell in with his plan. I had met the International Socialists. My new chum was called Peter Sedgwick, and he didn’t really wear the aspect of the recruiter. Well-known for his edition of Victor Serge, he was soon to become better known for his clinical evisceration of the work of R.D. Laing, and for his hilariously mordant critique of Herbert ...”

“... Dickens biography that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton dwells exclusively on the author’s ‘patron saint’, Harriet Weaver. Surprisingly – for a study whose main concern is the suppression or revelation ...”