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“... boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space ...”

“... the wind, but a majestic fighting machine all the same. This is not the impression given by Michael Duffy in his brisk and lively contribution to Britain and Revolutionary France, a volume of essays edited by Colin Jones and published by the University of Exeter. Duffy accuses Pitt and the government he led of squandering inadequate resources in the ...”

“... with an artlessness akin to innocence. Nicholson looks back to and draws strength from ‘wise, proverbial days’, though the wisdom of the proverbs – such as that                              everybody born Under the shadow of Black Combe Will come back there to die – may seem at worst perverse and at best ...”

“... to the complexity of its organisation. The ending of ‘Morpho Eugenia’ made me think of Michael Heseltine. The story opened up the deep mines of the realist novel only to shut them down with the ruthless logic of allegory and fable. William Adamson, the son of a Yorkshire Methodist butcher, is an entomologist who has spent ten years in the Amazon ...”

“... or of other objects of general concern’. Among the first products of the new regime were the wise decision not to prosecute Lolita and the unwise decision to prosecute Lady Chatterley’s Lover.In the years before the law was changed there had been indications that Victorian notions of decency were ceasing to be a viable test of criminality. Perhaps the ...”

“... They married in 1895 and had two sons. This marriage lasted until her death in 1927 and it seems wise not to rush to judgment about it. When Jane died, Wells was distraught and worked out some of his grief by writing a loving extended portrait of her. This wasn’t just piety engendered by loss: he had always appreciated her qualities and had remained ...”

“... boys who carry knives into the playground are likely to be reported to the police. This may be wise, but the boys with knives understand something about war that the boys with model soldiers don’t: war is an intimate business. Some of the nastiest things happen close up, between individuals. Sometimes they don’t involve weapons. At dinner ...”

“... methodical detective and the frightened client develop, almost despite themselves, a flirtatious, wise-cracking rapport. Yet Wray seems embarrassed at having to construct these scenes at all, and the embarrassment seeps into and discolours the rest of the novel. Ali appears at the start of the novel’s second chapter: Detective Ali Lateef – born Rufus ...”

“... the event has slipped British historical memory. I don’t imagine the topic will make it into Michael Gove’s ‘patriotic’ school history syllabus, and even at the time it was seen as something of an embarrassment. A war ‘undertaken against a nation so puerile in that art’, one military official wrote, ‘would better deserve the name of ...”

“... real books to his name and selections of work in the two most influential anthologies of the time, Michael Roberts’s Faber Book of Modern Verse and Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Eliot was a sincere admirer and generous patron; Yeats was delighted with Barker’s ‘lovely subtle mind and a rhythmic invention comparable to Gerard Hopkins’. What ...”

“... sounds like Chandler, the heroine muses in a Woolfian fugue and so on (the veteran translator Michael Henry Heim was in action here). This time, Canongate has reproduced her polyphony of registers by commissioning three translators to work on the different parts of the book and give the memoir, fiction and essay a different feel. Ugrešić studied in ...”

“... Forster, Wells and Galsworthy for material, and takes their social criticism at face value.Is it wise to rely so heavily on these novelists’ arguments in constructing a moral critique? In every era writers can be found condemning the money-worship, tawdriness and anti-intellectualism of their own day and in every era the common weaknesses of human nature ...”

“... an account that identifies a deep political wisdom in the English, expressed above all through the wise moderation of those statesmen who adapted to changing circumstances without falling into either rigid reaction or unbridled revolution. The origins of this account are traced to the middle of the 17th century as parliamentary lawyers attempted to formulate ...”

“... offers a frightening gallery of rogue vents – from Eric von Stroheim in The Great Gabbo to Michael Redgrave in Dead of Night and Anthony Hopkins in Magic – who have been led astray by their dummy-selves; and real vents can be just as mixed up as fictional ones. When the English entertainer Arthur Prince died in 1948, his jolly partner Jim was ...”

“... is the deliberate killing of human children who have a right to live. One pro-life activist, Michael Griffin, was recently found guilty of murder because he shot a Florida doctor dead outside an abortion clinic. Though he now claims he was brainwashed, he is reported to have written a letter from jail in which he encouraged other activists to do the ...”