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“... Braudel is different. His thesis, on The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, was certainly long enough and ambitious enough – the first edition of the book ran to some six hundred thousand words, and it has since been considerably enlarged. As a result of the war, most of which he spent in a German prisoner-of-war camp near ...”

“... Orthodox get-up – black hat and gabardine. In ‘Eli, the Fanatic’, the transformation helps Philip Roth connect up some of the leading themes of his short stories: anxiety, desire, separation, the odd, unsettling consequences of changes that are incomplete. There are risks for the writer who imagines what a devout ...”

“... of Heaven. He was handsome, butch, gum-chewing and easy-going as Chuck Yeager, the test pilot, in Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983) – by which time his long-term relationship with Jessica Lange had begun on the set of Frances (1982). And he found time to work on screenplays, too, contributing to Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) and, most ...”

“... not as a purveyor of self-help but for writing some of the more ambitious and surprising American short stories of the 20th century. And while she did write about gossip, women’s friendships, long days alone with toddlers and other aspects of experience that were not, in the 1950s, generally considered the stuff of serious fiction, even some of the great ...”

“... In his lucid and bold meditation on the aesthetics of the extraordinary in art and science, Philip Fisher seeks to restore it to its Cartesian pride of place as a passion fit for grownups and intellectuals. It is a tonic to put down the latest issue of a scholarly journal and pick up this short but ample book, in ...”

“... Roland Barthes’s study of ‘Sarrasine’, was the intellectual rage. The climax of Balzac’s short story, in which girl is discovered to be boy, has a strong bearing on The Wasp Factory. The other influence on Banks’s binaristic obsessions is the SF writer Philip K. Dick – master of alternative universes and split ...”

“... make philosophy grab the world again and prove that philosophical intuition has not run dry.’Philip Kitcher is with the romantics. He began his career working in relatively technical areas of the philosophy of mathematics and science, but soon turned towards contentious issues in biology – including creationism and evolutionary psychology – as well ...”

“... next to Mailer’s name. A similar tactic might happily have been ventured by the publishers of Philip Larkin’s Letters: the book’s back pages are going to be well-thumbed. ‘Hi, Craig,’ see page 752, you ‘mad sod’; ‘Hi, John,’ see page 563, you ‘arse-faced trendy’; ‘Hi, David,’ see page 266, you ‘deaf cunt’, and so on. Less ...”

“... Even so, as Flanders laments, nothing came of the wood engraving. Once the first baby arrived, Philip, destined to be another disappointing son, Georgie was exiled from the artistic life. Outside the studio she heard ‘through its closed doors the well-known voices of friends . . . while I sat with my little son on my knee and dropped selfish ...”

“... had studied at Cambridge, and reporting the reaction of the leading men’s rights activist Philip Davies MP, who declared the article evidence of the ‘extremist, virtue-signalling … metropolitan left-wing politically correct drivel which is so prevalent at the BBC’. The day after, the Daily Express ran a poll to find out whether its readers ...”

“... sit down at table with his own salt and pepper. It is not, however, a technique I associate with Philip Roth. Roth’s preferred method has been to bombard the reader with sensory and intellectual stimuli, a gouache painted so stridently that at times it appears to be held in place only by the muscularity of the stroke; and American Pastoral, Roth’s 21st ...”

“... a British audience will resist Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s portrayal of Henry VIII as camp, weedy and short. But they will believe almost anything else: that Thomas More was a martyr for freedom of conscience, that Anne Boleyn was a witch, and that the monasteries were dissolved by men on horseback who rode in mob-handed and decapitated monks with battle-axes. It ...”

“... is apparent in British politics. The recent spat between the Tory ministers Michael Gove and Philip Hammond over the cancellation of a contract to train Saudi prison guards exposed the clash between morality and mercantilism. The balance may be shifting as security pragmatism is added to moral distaste to tip the scales in favour of getting tough on ...”

“... grandstanding, they have in the past forced reluctant public figures to face difficult questions: Philip Green’s reputation has never recovered from his bad-tempered, six-hour defence of the role he played in the collapse of BHS in 2016. Action is also being taken in Whitehall. In mid-April, Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, gave senior civil servants 72 ...”

“... complexity: the rival parties not only playing, as it were, up and down the field but across it. Philip Waller has set out to disentangle the confusions of Liverpool politics and has done so with intense detail. Social history is treated as background to the political narrative, which in its turn becomes an analysis of each succeeding general election with a ...”