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“... The ringing tone, he notices, is ‘different from the Austrian one, lower and consisting of two short purring sounds’. After listening to it for the tenth time, he hangs up. Ten pages later, after several unanswered emergency calls and a mad dash through the city centre, he still hasn’t seen a soul. An alien abduction? An Alpine tsunami? A nuclear ...”

“... woman until I have completed my task?’ Bewildered, I made no reply. Meanwhile Dr Goebbels gets short shrift when he grabs her breast, pins her against the wall of his office and tries to kiss her. Leni resourcefully edges along until she can press her back against a bell-push summoning an adjutant. ‘When I left his offices,’ she reflects, ‘I knew ...”

“... talk about God – be it! Find the place, the formula … Ah, Larry, it isn’t that life is so short, it’s that it’s everlasting!’ Henry Miller wrote to Lawrence Durrell in 1959. The formula, if one were to look to history for clues, seems fairly simple. Be white, male, fairly imposing in stature, and in possession of a large ship and obedient ...”

“... In Philip Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer, 23-year-old Nathan Zuckerman, ‘already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman’, makes a jaunty pilgrimage to the clapboard farmhouse of Emanuel Lonoff, the great Jewish-American writer whose work Zuckerman admires but aims to surpass. Although Lonoff writes about Jews, he has secluded himself in the goyish New England countryside in the hope of being left alone: ‘I turn sentences around ...”

“... He himself worked in his youth as a news editor for Radio Panamericana, studied law and wrote short stories – and seems also to have conducted a secret and much-obstructed affair, against the will of his family, with his aunt-by-marriage, the Julia to whom the book is dedicated. In his controversial first novel, The City and the Dogs (1963), translated ...”

“... Collins Wordpower series, written by the late Graham King, who will be remembered, according to Philip Howard’s Foreword and fortunately for King, as ‘more than the marketing man who transformed the Sun and the Sunday Times’, though we musn’t forget he was that, too. The Guide announces itself as being for those who ‘want to write a novel, draft a ...”

“... there is no economic problem with ending austerity.One political problem is that the chancellor, Philip Hammond, recently described the current deficit of 2.5 per cent as ‘not sustainable’. Hammond, probably with support from senior Treasury civil servants, wants to start reducing the government debt to GDP ratio as soon as possible. For the moment he ...”

“... an eye-catching evocation of depth placed among a flat patchwork of walls, windows and shutters. Philip Steadman’s short, lucid, exemplary book offers an explanation for Vermeer’s ‘perplexing and paradoxical quality: a perfect perspectival illusion of depth coexisting with an effect of surface flatness which can ...”

“... towards which their fictions tend. If they do have such a cadence, it will be more apparent in short fictions than in their longer work, for very prosaic reasons: because the beginning and the ending of a short story are more likely to be read in the same sitting, and because you get more endings per volume to judge ...”

“... the Brexit white paper was, he said, ‘the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200’ – and he must have enjoyed expressing his hope that it would ‘not be necessary for Her Majesty’s stay at Sandringham to be interrupted by her in person having to prorogue Parliament’. Speaking the next day at a Women’s ...”

“... his best in a messy middle-of-the-road muddle’. This from Wilson’s official biographer, Philip Ziegler. Wilson had one or two good jokes, unlike Callaghan or poor Attlee, so often the butt of other people’s. Tony Blair is not much given to joking. The three memorable gags of his career have come as it nears its end. It’s interesting, in a person ...”

“... who might have been expected to criticise Koh have said little against him. The NYU law professor Philip Alston, a former UN special rapporteur for extrajudicial killing who has questioned the legality of US drone strikes, has praised him as a marvellous choice for teaching human rights. When the modern human rights movement began in the 1970s, no one ...”

“... We are fighting a losing battle,’ Philip Hensher writes in The Missing Ink, his funny, exasperated book in defence of handwriting.* He has no difficulty spotting the enemy. Consider the advice from the Indiana Department of Education last year that only proficiency with a keyboard would be expected of pupils in its charge ...”

“... between 35 and 55 and of a younger woman, a pair Andronikos soon identified as the Macedonian king Philip II – father of Alexander the Great, builder of the army and the European empire that gave his son the means to conquer the world – and one of his seven wives. But it was not long before different candidates were proposed, as experts started to examine ...”

“... did have a way with words.’ The commonplaces are right for the people and the situations. This short, subtle, beautifully organised and orchestrated novel positively gains from the deliberate restraint and detachment of the writing. We are given no example of the dirty talk with which Julia embarrasses her circle, and the apparent openness of Fay’s ...”