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“... expectation that other libraries will eventually report their own holdings. In the past the only major library to have publicised its erotica, to the extent of freely letting the public know what it had, was the Bibliothèque Nationale, the contents of whose Enfer, the French term for bibliothecal exile, are listed in its general catalogue. Only in the last ...”

“... William Lilly was the first to produce a major textbook of astrology in the English language, at a time when the truth of astrology was almost universally recognised. At their peak in the 1650s his almanacs sold up to 30,000 copies a year. From them he may only have netted a modest £70 a year (enough for a gentleman to live on), but they served to advertise his astrological practice, from which we have the surviving records of many thousands of consultations ...”

“... 1954) but on its ability to tell complex stories – its contributors included William Faulkner, John Updike, Jack Kerouac and Don DeLillo. In Blood in the Garden, Herring is firmly in narrative mode, and he wants to remind us what a good narrative sport basketball is.This is true for several reasons, some more interesting than others. First, the obvious ...”

“... of the Irish Citizen Army, ostensibly for just this purpose; and since the Citizen Army played a major role in the Easter Rising, it is possible to see Shaw as having helped to engender the event. Though he did not directly approve of the insurrection, he correctly predicted that the execution of its leaders would transform Irish public opinion. Twenty or so ...”

“... every night it sometimes seemed – and observe the red knees of the girls. ‘So good. A major classic,’ she had told a friend in high school of The Castle, which she hadn’t read. At that point she strongly felt she had read books she had only heard of, for imagine her getting this far in the first place! Plus she just loved castles, they were so ...”

“... In this, the first major biography of Wagner’s daughter-in-law, Brigitte Hamann tries very hard to be fair to a subject who, one might think, scarcely deserves it. It would be hard to find a better example than the Wagner dynasty of the continuity between the myth of a glorious Germany and its terrible enactment ...”

“... processes compel it to change its stance (as in the case of the legislative amendment proposed by John McCain and adopted by the US Senate, which caused the Bush administration to change its actions and commit more clearly to international obligations placing limits on the interrogation of detainees). Goldsmith and Posner do not discuss any of this. Their ...”

“... in early 2004, now with an updated post-election foreword – comprises biographies of the major Bush women and their doings. The title page calls it ‘Tales of a Cynical Species’, probably only unintentionally suggesting that Bushwomen are not human beings. They are, at any rate, traitors who lend their gender to the enemy to befuddle their ...”

“... and so on. ‘The old school tie counted even more in Labour than in Conservative circles,’ John Colville observed. Despite the book’s title, he was anything but ‘the inevitable prime minister’. It isn’t just a matter of his undoubted conservatism on the matters listed above. After Oxford he had started to train as a lawyer but got distracted by ...”

“... problem, so long as the poor are better off than they used to be. ‘However rich a society,’ as John Moore, secretary of state for social security under Thatcher, once put it, ‘it will drag the incubus of relative poverty with it up the income scale. The poverty lobby would in their definition find poverty in Paradise.’ As national income rises, the ...”

“... same year, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum compared the Biafrans’ plight to that of Jews in Nazi Germany. John Lennon returned his MBE as a protest against the UK’s support of the federal government. Martin Amis, then a university student, was shocked to encounter ‘an incredible reactionary … who supports Nigeria against Biafra’; the same person, it turned ...”

“... Palestinian national coherence – legal, territorial, political and economic – has been a major obstacle to substantive peacemaking.’ Whatever their reservations about the organisation, the authors of the paper detected signs that Hamas was considering a shift of position even before the blockade: It is frequently stated that Israel or the United ...”

“... we are as the double almond concealed in one shell,’ he broods in ‘Colloquy with John Keats’, going on to predict his own equally untimely demise in harsh demotic terms – ‘Look! My number is up!’ After his cremation at Rookwood Cemetery Ethel opened his trunk and set about disposing of his pitiably meagre possessions; in the process ...”

“... a bit of a lightweight, a ‘natural number two’ who should never have become prime minister. John Grigg wrote of him before the Suez crisis: ‘Popularity means much more to him than it ever should mean to a statesman. Since the early days, when he was idolised by millions on account of his personal appearance and blameless views, he has never lost the ...”

“... October 1962 was not August 1914 because John Kennedy had learned the lessons of Munich, which may be summarised as follows: get angry in private, think before you speak, say what you want, make clear what you’re prepared to do, ignore bluster, repeat yourself as often as necessary and keep the pressure on. Where Kennedy learned the mixture of forbearance and resolution which lies at the heart of international peace and good marriages is a mystery; his mother and father were no better at solving problems than Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler ...”