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“... join forces, for reasons that may never become clear. Cem headed out into the wilderness with a small new fringe party; Dervis joined the CHP (Republican People’s Party), a social democrat grouping descended from the party of Atatürk, one of the last remnants of Turkey’s secular probity. I briefly encountered – or heckled – Dervis while he was ...”

“... portrait, the truth of the image is independent of the smudging or misrepresentation of small details, which the mind, like the eye, corrects instinctively; such surface features are no hindrance to the perception of deeper and perhaps richer truths. Of all books on Shostakovich, this is the one that best depicts the horrors and triumphs of his life ...”

“... In general, the closer he is to epigram the funnier and neater. But Enright is always likeable. Stephen Romer’s self-presentation is not. Certainly, one comes away from Plato’s Ladder with a powerful sense of the Platonic Form of The Poet. The Poet dedicates poems to friends, has other artist friends, like a painter called Caroline (‘You are my ...”

“... and it is striking how little we suddenly find we care about any of them. The novel has done its small work, come to a close, and leaves us with just a certain admiration for the author’s concise manner and manipulative skills. Rudolf Nassauer’s Kramer’s Goats promises a more substantial reward for the reader, as, given its themes of the Nazi aftermath ...”

“... Stephen Hawking is now 50 years old, and has lived 25 years longer than he once expected to live. As a scientist he long ago earned the respect of his colleagues; more recently, with the astonishing success of his book A Brief History of Time, he has become a widely recognised public figure. Immobile for decades, he is now unable to communicate except by means of an electronic voice-synthesiser connected to a word-processor ...”

“... a menu of ‘Primary Colors Specials’, including Lasagne di Paul Begalanese and Pork Chop George Stephen-applesauce. There’s a copy prominently displayed in the new books section of the White House library, and 742,000 have been shipped to bookstores to meet the demand. It’s number one on the New York Times bestseller list; North American paperback ...”

“... Stephen L. Carter has written the kind of novel in which the bad guys say ‘very well’ when they mean ‘OK’; in which the hero calls a visit from old friends ‘a delightfully rambunctious affair’ and his rocky marriage a ‘tumultuous mutuality’; in which ‘homes’ are ‘spacious’, jealousy ‘flames afresh’ and eminent legal scholars spend dinner parties debating the existence of God ...”

“... Stephen Braude is a philosopher who thinks that the phenomenon of multiple personality teaches something about the human mind. Until recently he would not have had much of a phenomenon: a thin diet of 19th-century anecdotes, a little flurry of cases in France after 1875, and a few more described at greater length in America after the turn of the century ...”

“... want of occupation’. Although he lived beyond his means, his was the relatively small-scale, soberly-incurred, financial anxiety of the overstretched professional man, not the profligacy of the aristocrat. Educating his children, paying their medical bills, keeping up appearances – these were the sources of sleeplessness. When his ...”

“... more than life-size; they take you by the scruff and hold your eye. Accompanying The Burghers is a small bronze of the final version of Balzac as well as the striding nude study for it in plaster (shown here). Elsewhere there is a plaster of The Kiss at the original size, as well as the enlarged marble version from the Tate. The Thinker is there, ...”

“... The master-pieces of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama were triumphs over small-minded bigotry, and they must now, in Empson’s view, be saved from the prim, puritanical dons who ‘think that everybody in the period reverenced Degree’. Those dons have a ‘distaste for the normal affections’ and tirelessly try to pervert the ...”

“... for any Soviet person who wanted to make life liveable. The Bolshevik leadership, along with its small army of technicians, scientists, scholars, writers and artists, was attempting to establish a new space-time continuum for a country of 150 million people. While it had some success in creating a modern urban culture for an aspirational new generation, it ...”

“... look, for instance, at the fact that, once they have paid a fee – the amount varies: £35 for a small money claim, rising to £1670 for a very large one, and £465 for a non-money claim – to set their case down for trial, major litigants get a court and a judge free of charge for as long as their litigation lasts. One may ask why a cost-conscious state is ...”

“... language because they’re bound to learn yours. The Conservative prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, and the man who on present showing is likely to be prime minister of Australia after September, Tony Abbott, have spoken up for the Anglosphere. In Britain, the Anglosphere is held up as an alternative way to exercise influence in the world by ...”

“... Adecade ago​ , the musician Stephen Coates was in St Petersburg to play a concert with his band. While he was there, some Russian friends took him to a flea market, where he found and bought a strange, unmarked disc. Back in London, he put it on: it was ‘Rock around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and His Comets. He held up the disc to the light and saw two skeletal hands ...”