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“... The ends​ of great fiction do not change, much,’ Zadie Smith wrote eight years ago in an essay about David Foster Wallace. ‘But the means do.’ She was between novels: three years had passed since her most traditional, On Beauty, was published; NW, her most experimental, wouldn’t appear for another four ...”

“... scandalous. Meanwhile, there’s little chance of scandal derailing ‘compassionate, decent’ Paul Wolfowitz’s bid to become the next president of the World Bank. The singular thing about Michael Jackson’s frailties is that they are far from humanising: the more that is revealed, the more alien he appears. Whether or not he is found guilty seems ...”

“... ink!), run "by the sort of men who called each other Wolly, Bunter, Biffy and Blinker. Mansfield Smith Cumming, the original ‘C.’, thought espionage ‘a capital sport’, and is memorably described by Phillip Knightley in his recently reissued study of 20th-century spying, The Second Oldest Profession:* He wore a gold-rimmed monocle, wrote only in ...”

“... for Brooke a small foothold in Gay Studies’. The star turn was a letter first printed in full in Paul Delany’s The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle (1987). Writing to James Strachey, Brooke describes some encounters with his fellow Rugbeian Denham Russell-Smith: We had hugged & kissed ...”

“... lobbying. Last November, Fred Cuny, styled as the Red Adair of the relief business, persuaded Paul Wolfowitz, the head of the Defence Department’s policy planning, that the Somali gangs snatching humanitarian supplies could easily be overwhelmed by sophisticated United States forces. A fair copy of their doodlings was slipped into the Oval Office ...”

“... discussion of the Statesman’s first years was Edward Hyams’s ‘house’ history. Adrian Smith makes a fuller attempt to place the early New Statesman in its various political and intellectual contexts and relates the fortunes of the small-circulation political weekly to the seismic political changes of 1916-29 that virtually destroyed British ...”

“... of a sailing ship on the rough sea coming suddenly alive and sucking in the children?’ Stevie Smith asked, reviewing C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in 1952. She liked depictions of people who disappeared into the objects of their gaze; a couple of years earlier, her poem ‘Deeply Morbid’ told the story of Joan, an office girl who goes to ...”

“... divisional court for the Government in 1982 in an initially successful attempt to deprive Mr Ron Smith of Leeds of his basic right to an inquest into the death of his daughter who had been found dead in strange circumstances in Saudi Arabia. The law at the time was clear – everyone had a right to an inquest into any dead body they brought to Britain. But ...”

“... to remember punk but a neo-hippy these days – recently mentioned she’d been to see Patti Smith, who was touring her 1975 album, Horses, for its 40th anniversary. ‘Patti, yeah! Went to see her at the Roundhouse. Paid £30, which I didn’t think was too bad … Didn’t stay that long, though’ – snip, snip – ‘Went up the front and had a ...”

“... like Hooked: Felski offers just one view of a landscape that has been sketched by Michael Polanyi, Paul Ricoeur, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Bruno Latour, Stephen Best, Toril Moi, Hal Foster, Namwali Serpell and others. Her current work is perhaps the liveliest and least plangent forum for questions about how to read and write criticism after theory. But read in ...”

“... a Boat in the same form, will have a mild idea of the task which faced the Cambridge graduate John Smith (a sizar, married with one child) when in 1819 he was hired to decipher the six volumes of Samuel Pepys’s diary on which Magdalene College had sat for over a century. Smith did not know the system of shorthand the ...”

“... Shortly after her husband’s death, Joy Williams entrusted the task to the Welsh historian Dai Smith, who had known (and greatly admired) Williams in the last decade or so of his life, and who shared many of his political allegiances. Smith was given unrestricted access to Williams’s papers; as, in effect, the ...”

“... in 1987 to International Thomson, who broke it up, selling the general and children’s list to Paul Hamlyn’s Octopus, itself subsequently acquired by Reed International. Methuen’s academic books remained with Thomson, who now bring them out under the Routledge imprint, another victim of conglomeration. In itself, merger is not alien to the British book ...”

“... speculates in a similar vein about the later and sunnier correspondence with the publisher, George Smith, whose evident pleasure in Brontë’s letters may partly have arisen, she thinks, from the artist’s capacity imaginatively to transform him with her pen, recreating him in a form cleverly designed to soothe his insecurities. Though Brontë’s teasingly ...”

“... temporal series with the former’. The contradiction is neatly exemplified in the epigraph of Paul Boyer’s book by the hymn ‘When the Roll is Called up Yonder’: When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound, And time shall be no more, And the morning breaks eternal bright and fair. If the end of time is unimaginable and the angel cannot bring history ...”