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“... in Ancient Society: Language Contact and the Written Word, edited by Adams, Marc Janse and Simon Swain.* Together with Bruno Rochette’s Le Latin dans le monde grec (1997), which is mainly concerned with literature, these books have placed the study of language in the Roman Empire on a far firmer footing. Until recently, most classical scholars had ...”

“... the Welsh government published a report called Second Homes: Developing New Policies in Wales, by Simon Brooks of Swansea University’s School of Management. Many of its recommendations on controlling the use of the Welsh housing stock through tax and administrative measures have been turned into legislation. But Brooks’s remark that ‘the “housing ...”

“... could she be bothered to make more and market them I’m sure they would sell for a substantial price. As it is, it stands on the kitchen table waiting to find its – or her – place. A lovely thing. 31 December. Because some 25 years ago The Madness of King George was nominated for an Oscar, around Christmas we generally get a clutch of DVDs soliciting ...”

“... copy I bought on my next trip to Paris is priced in francs: 37.70, reduced from the publisher’s price of 39.90. I remember taking the novel on a few holidays but never getting around to it. Something about the title kept putting me off: that cosy French chez followed by a harsher, doubly foreign surname. But I must have started it once, because there was a ...”

“... Baker’s only contribution to the genre of the parody-anthology. I don’t quite want to say to Simon Brett that he should come back because all is forgiven, but at least his Faber Book of Parodies (1984) wasn’t a breath of fresh air. The field is still held by Dwight Macdonald’s Parodies, first published here in 1961 and going stronger than ...”

“... is defined in reference to literature. However, as Lévy’s interview here with Claude Simon makes clear, in French cultural life today these are no longer competing, but simply different worlds: ‘the demise of the prophets’ after the Sixties also marks the end of a privileged connection between intellectuals and literature. This first became ...”

“... practice. It is as if we had only the lyrics, without recordings or melodies, of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Joan Baez – and those only in indifferent Portuguese translations. Most of their power and all of their subtlety would vanish. For similar reasons, the troubadours have more often been honoured as cultural pioneers than admired as ...”

“... rationalist world. Perhaps the artwork was the one thing left that had a value rather than a price, and didn’t exist for the sake of something else. Like God, poems and symphonies existed just for the hell of it. As the idea of God was gradually ousted, art was on hand to fill his shoes. Like him, it was a repository of absolute value. Like ...”

“... it sold out before it had even begun. Duran Duran – triumphant in pastel suits made by Antony Price – sailed into the charts on a windswept hash of lifestyle guff, poncing around the Caribbean on a hideous yacht. The romance went out of New Romanticism the minute the band’s bass player, John Taylor, in the video for the single ‘Rio’, crawled up ...”

“... or mitigate what some already called the ‘Despotique Tyranny of Booksellers’ – though at the price of subjecting them to what modern authors often revile as the triumphant idiocy of copyeditors. The existence of these figures, whom Goldgar describes, quite reasonably, as the first literary agents, points to the increasing specialisation and ...”

“... born to a Communist, a grandson of my pious father and Lena’s reactionary father Reb Solomon Simon. What a combination of events and genes! Zosia wrote that she had written to me at my brother’s address in Seagate but the letter had come back. Someone who knew about me had given her the address of the Forward. She was coming to New York City from ...”

“... of Empire whose people, except for those in Hong Kong, were now especially dependent on Britain. Simon Winchester recently made it his ambition to visit all 16 populated areas still formally under Crown control. He couldn’t get to Pitcairn in the end, but did manage to reach Tristan da Cunha, and he has many good anecdotes to tell. His occupation as roving ...”

“... The novel has had very bad reviews and quite a lot of publicity, the latter largely because Simon and Schuster first paid a great deal of money for it, then dropped it after some people who worked there objected to passages which described women being tortured and murdered. The chief technical problem facing Ellis was that of imagining a plausible ...”

“... for Mills & Boon, initially published under a pseudonym, and a less successful medieval one, Simon the Coldheart, as well as a contemporary novel, Instead of the Thorn, about a sheltered young woman so horrified by the prospect of sleeping with her new husband that she runs away from him and must spend the rest of the book trying to reconcile herself to ...”

“... the speech in which the old king tells Cordelia’s hitherto enthusiastic suitor Burgundy that her price is now fallen than it does in its actual dramatic context. The speech forms part of a long, irrelevant piece of dissimulation in which the duke of Milan, tipped off by one gentleman of Verona that his daughter is planning to elope with the other, toys with ...”