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“... serious enemy may yet again turn out to be the Russians: the head of the British army, General Sir Nicholas Carter, said in January that Russia presents ‘the most complex and capable security challenge we have faced since the Cold War’. At the end of February, Vladimir Putin, campaigning for his fourth term as president, unveiled the next generation of ...”

“... of himself’ and having ‘regained his innocence ... can go calmly to his death’. Neither Thomas Mann’s novella nor Britten’s treatment of it give an ounce of support for these readings. The imprisonment of Aschenbach’s mind in the maze of desire is imaged in the maze of Venice, a closed-in world, fetid with the stench of plague. Britten’s ...”

“... incorporating, as it were, the back half of Beaumont, who otherwise appears in the novel as Thomas de Blacqueville, Olivier’s best friend, bumped off in a duel before Olivier has even embarked for the New World. By grafting Beaumont onto Garmont and Tocqueville onto Blacqueville, Carey establishes the rules of his creative game and signs over to ...”

“... in primitive forgery, or mimic it. It is not clear that even an arch literary forger like Thomas J. Wise actually committed a criminal act for which he could be prosecuted by the DPP. It would be sensible to replace the term ‘literary forgery’ with Anthony Grafton’s neologism, ‘pseudepigrapha’. This blanket description would cover everything ...”

“... of which one is reminded by both Mordecai Richler’s anthology and Ernestine Schlant and Thomas Rimer’s collection of essays. There’s the fact, among many other examples, that US air bases on Japanese territory, acquired at the end of the Second World War, were used against Vietnam. There is the durability of Central European anti-semitism. And ...”

“... have a lot in common with George Washington? – is now a not very funny comic wine columnist. Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge is a period novel about Silicon Alley. Pynchon is fond of silly names, and in the dotcom bubble they seemed to be self-generating: Razorfish, AltaVista, HotBot, Yahoo! There was a strange connection during that boom between whimsy ...”

“... to publish a definitive, ten-volume edition of Burke’s correspondence, supervised by the late Thomas Copeland. And since 1981, the Clarendon Press has been publishing Burke’s writings and speeches under the overall editorship of Paul Langford, the first systematically new edition since that compiled between 1792 and 1827. No one reading these genuinely ...”

“... his weekly school letter and gave it to the headmaster to read, revise and encypher. Professor Nicholas, the editor, fawns and bows, proclaims those despatches written in Berlin’s absence to be ‘school of Berlin’: but he cannot get away from the fact that, deprived of the right to portray personalities, express opinions, or be funny, Theseus puts up ...”

“... on Elizabeth’s life. Young Bess had Jean Simmons in the lead. Hemmed in by Stewart Granger as Thomas Seymour and Charles Laughton reprising his prewar role as Henry VIII, there isn’t much Simmons can do beyond tossing her hair and striking a curious hands-on-hips Holbeinesque pose to suggest that there is more to her defiance than teenage sulks. Her ...”

“... We still​ do not know what Germans thought they were fighting for,’ Nicholas Stargardt announces at the outset of his ambitious and absorbing new book, ‘or how they managed to continue their war until the bitter end.’ This is not for want of trying: numerous historians have analysed German opinion and behaviour at every stage of the Second World War, using above all the Meldungen aus dem Reich, the regular confidential reports on civilian morale made by SS Security Service and local and regional government officials, together with diaries and correspondence, especially field-post letters to and from soldiers at the front, to chart the diverse and changing attitudes to victory and defeat ...”

“... When the Whitechapel Gallery held a fine anniversary exhibition in 1982, the then director, Nicholas Serota, hoped Wren would offer ‘a salutary example’ for the planners of Docklands. He didn’t, except for a more recent Dome at Greenwich. The occult tradition recounted in Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat, with its invocation of Wren’s dark protégé ...”

“... English’), though understandable, are nonetheless ‘in some way bad’, as Neil Smith and Nicholas Allott put it in their study of Chomsky, and that the ability to sense this badness is innate. Another piece of evidence for innateness, on the Chomskyan view, is the ease with which children learn their first language, contrasted with the difficulty ...”

“... of King’s (and Queen’s) Bench, which was not modest in its pretensions. ‘This court,’ Sir Thomas Fleming said, ‘is the jurisdiction of the queen herself. It is so high that in its presence other jurisdictions cease.’ It had, according to Coke in 1615, ‘the survey of all other courts’. Lord Chancellor Ellesmere sought to resist this ...”

“... sheep farmer, he is helped up the social ladder by the most socially mobile of all Tudor lawyers, Thomas Cromwell, yet he remains principled, modest and compassionate, a humanist in the modern as well as the Tudor sense. It’s significant that he is a hunchback, a painful disability that affects how others see him as well as his own view of himself. He weeps ...”

“... alewives, bakers, butchers and other traders, and notched them on sticks. The Nonconformist writer Thomas DeLaune, writing in 1681, declared that ‘this Antient way of striking of Tallies hath been found, by long experience, to be absolutely the best way that was ever invented, for it is Morally impossible so to Falsifie or Counterfeit a Tally’: the ...”