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“... perhaps unilaterally assumed – a series of titles that implied the delegation of extraordinary powers from the Emperor Gallienus himself. Such stylings were for the benefit of the Greeks Odaenathus ruled, but he began at the same time to employ Persian titles that spoke to a very different audience, to the local Syrians and Arabs who liked being ruled by a ...”

“... Cohen, the model for Justine, at the Scottish School for Girls. From ‘Vintage Alexandria’ by Michael Haag (American University in Cairo Press, $39.95). And then there are the carefully rendered deaths, remarkable in their variety. There is the dying of the furrier Cohen, former patron of Darley’s fragile mistress Melissa, a man who lies in a hospital ...”

“... not written for the films. That is only one of many reasons why I prefer it.’ This separation of powers is categoric and sensible. But ‘The Third Man’ is the title story of the reprinted volume under review, and we are reading it. Some of us, while respecting Greene’s own preference and his many reasons, may well prefer it to the earlier story. Prefer ...”

“... as 1940, when Chamberlain and the arch-appeasers were branded ‘the guilty men’ by a young Michael Foot and two other socialist polemicists. They overstated what was an arguable case, that the executors of appeasement’s closing phase had been arrogant, ignorant and insensitive; which naturally bred a counter-argument to the effect that they had been ...”

“... The Western powers and the USSR started by producing and stockpiling nuclear weapons as a deterrent to general war. The idea seemed simple enough. Because of the enormous amount of destruction that could be wreaked by a single nuclear explosion, the idea was that both sides in what we still see as an East-West conflict would be deterred from taking any aggressive action which might endanger the vital interests of the other ...”

“... Monsters and delusions of a more agreeable kind lurk in the stylish, elaborately skilful pages of Michael Dibdin’s A Rich Full Death. Ostensibly this is a detective story, a species of Holmesian charade penned by a paranoiac Dr Watson: yet even at this level it teases the reader with mysteries that go beyond the conventionally mysterious. The story is set ...”

“... pursuits to write imitation Agatha Christie detective stories, so when I first learned that Michael Dummett, widely regarded as the most formidable philosopher of his generation, was about to publish a book about Tarot cards, I rather naturally assumed that it must be an exercise of this same recreational sort. In a certain very off-centre sense, my ...”

“... were watching a bland television soap opera called The Sullivans when her father, the Reverend Michael Saward, Vicar of St Mary’s, Ealing, opened the door to three men wearing balaclavas and brandishing knives. After they had ransacked the house, two of the men raped Jill. Her father and boyfriend were tied up and beaten unconscious. For all the ...”

“... Tiepolo,’ Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall write, ‘is not a difficult painter. He is accessible and easy to like.’ Well, up to a point. For example, while I did not find the Tiepolos in the Royal Academy’s exhibition of 18th-century Venetian art ‘difficult’ in any obvious way, I did not find them ‘easy to like’ either ...”

“... since Labour began electing ‘leaders’) never to have held a ministerial post – being PPS to Michael Foot for a year does not count. He is the only British party leader to have been an EU Commissioner – and is likely to remain so. As a result his record in ‘government’ is hard to judge, since what the Commissioners do (unless it is thought to be ...”

“... to attend overnight at an address elsewhere. These laws are based on anti-terror provisions, whose powers of forced relocation have gone without significant challenge, but their use will not be limited to criminals. They will apply to people who have done little more than attend two protests considered likely to cause serious disruption to two or more people ...”

“... things that I have seen I now can see no more’) confirmed and supported Wordsworth’s powers. The Immortality Ode has all the gusto of a celebration of his uniquely creative form of solipsism, whose powers of sympathy are as great as its powers of attracting love, or of ...”

“... technologies learned from India, and the degree to which all 17th and early 18th-century European powers lagged behind China economically. These trends in recent history writing – a deliberate and much greater stress on how major changes in the West in past centuries were triggered or moulded by developments elsewhere – have piggy-backed on and been ...”

“... an early suffragist. She knew how to earn good money as a dressmaker and hen-keeper. Her husband Michael Cleary was an educated and literate cooper, whose services were much in demand by local businesses. He had served his apprenticeship in the progressive town of Clonmel and had good prospects. As a couple, they seemed the very image of a modernising ...”

“... the role of Bryan and the director kept saying: ‘More pompous, Morone. Make him more pompous.’ Michael Kazin is a fine historian who specialises in the lost causes of the left. He has written sympathetic books on the Populist movement and the 1960s. In A Godly Hero, his life of Bryan, he now draws an unexpected conclusion: defying capitalists and defending ...”