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“... Walpole are famous) and Naples (Sir William Hamilton). There were political refugees, notably Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, and his brother, the Cardinal Duke of York (who was born in Rome and left only once to go to Paris in 1745 and prepare to go to England should the rebellion be successful). Many Jacobites had followed them and some may ...”

“... the sensation of anal intercourse without spelling out what it is. Griffith-Jones did not use this passage in cross-examining any of the defence witnesses; he saved it for his final speech and then read it out very deliberately to the jury, pausing occasionally to remark ‘Not very easy to know what he is driving at’ and so forth. The belief that ...”

“... our behaviour rather than the mysteries of human existence or technology or the universe. For Charles Tilly, people give reasons not ‘because of some universal craving for truth or coherence’ but because they want to confirm, negotiate or repair their relationships. The whole business of giving reasons for what we do and for what happens is basically ...”

“... novel – about a summer holiday he spent when he was 11 – as an adult book. But his publisher, Charles Darke, insists that it is a children’s book, that children will read it and understand that childhood is finite: ‘that it won’t last, it can’t last, that sooner or later they’re finished, done for, that their childhood is not for ever.’ ...”

“... itty-bitty piece of factual lint no one else has – and here comes Kaplan, gathering nuts in May. Passage after passage is devoted to travel and lodging arrangements. When Vidal takes a swing through Italy, we’re told every town on his itinerary. It isn’t enough that Vidal should fly to Rome, we have to know that he ...”

“... power, superiority, pre-eminence or authority ecclesiastical or spiritual within this realm’? Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer, turned his fire on the archbishop of Canterbury: ‘I do feel that the archbishop, when looking at Brexit, should remember the Act in Restraint of Appeals. After ...”

“... century between the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England in 1603 and the passage of the legislation that at last legally united his two kingdoms in the reign of his great-granddaughter Anne. Nothing if not ambitious, Archipelagic English seeks to remap a literary period that in the bad old days just about got you from Shakespeare’s ...”

“... subtlety, he is telling us that we don’t exactly think in language: we think too fast for the passage of words – thought can be as instinctive as eating. And he is dramatising this, not merely stating it. By contrast, Byatt, elsewhere in her new novel, describes young Dorothy watching a marionette version of Der Sandmann, thus: ‘Dorothy hadn’t liked ...”

“... past all the kitchen drawers so full of sharp and threatening things.Such spiky delights. The passage follows a description of a group of servant children – ‘he’ is a young Black servant – taking the piss out of their masters and mistresses. It’s a kind of purposive fooling around that recalls the fun dances, which are also dangerous ...”

“... its own sense of fact: how else could it honourably report a debate between Father Cuthbert and Charles Bradlaugh on whether ‘Jesus Christ was an Historical Reality’? Father Cuthbert is a walking, or kneeling, anachronism: ‘There seemed something particularly bizarre in witnessing a figure who might have stepped out of the pages of Sir Walter Scott or ...”

“... Christians thought it would come in 1000, 17th-century Christians in 1666, Cotton Mather in 1736, Charles Wesley in 1794, Mother Shipton in 1881, Pierre Lachèze in 1900 and Jim Jones in 1967. The end of the great plague of 2020 may be in sight, but doomsday predictions come thick and fast these days. The ‘sixth mass extinction event’, the election of ...”

“... isn’t a useful guide to anything much except what happened to Doughty in the Desert, a short passage of Arabian history intersecting an aberrant fragment of the development of English literary sensibility, an unrepeatable moment in which everything is already different from the way it had been when Burton penetrated Mecca in drag, and from the way it ...”

“... of élitism and philistinism. The fact that the PEN/Faulkner awards panel included the novelist Charles Johnson, Guterson’s writing instructor – who also provided a puff for the book – did not seem to arouse any concern, but then the chances of finding a judge from the writing-seminar circuit who had no connection with Guterson were quite slim. Set in ...”

“... of more rewarding passengers: officers bound for India, women who brought along harps and pianos. Passage in such a ship, partly a warship, partly a freighter and partly a passenger vessel, was quite unlike anything that could now be experienced. Cabins were jury-rigged of canvas, so that they could be rapidly dismantled if the guns needed to be run ...”

“... routine question on ‘just cause and impediment’. And those equally ‘literary’ figures of Charles and Di, the gallant prince leading his innocent young bride to the altar, provide an image of romance that still manages to support even the cheapest shotgun wedding. Surprisingly, Rubinstein found no place in her anthology for this royal epitome of ...”