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“... Tichbornism had in it a strong element of popular Toryism and nostalgia for the days before the Norman Yoke. Rather despairingly, McWilliam concludes that ‘the best way to think of it is as a form of pastiche.’ Pastiche of what exactly, and who is doing the pastiching? McWilliam repeatedly tries to anchor the affair to a unique set of historical ...”

“... and rarely clunk as they’re dropped in. He makes historical details earn their place on the page by doing more than one job. The wretched parrots serve not only as objects of Shardlake’s pity but as a critique of England’s nouveaux riches and their craving for exotica, and as an image of England turned Babel. Scarnsea, the Benedictine monastery ...”

“... in the feminist fight club classic Town Bloody Hall (1979), where, from the audience, she takes Norman Mailer to task for his patronising use of the term ‘lady’ as a prefix – lady writer, lady critic. Even when issuing a rebuke (‘It feels like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t feel right to us’), Sontag keeps her cool in a raucous setting where ...”

“... low over the tops and it feels like a scene from the 1940s. It could be a Michael Powell film or a page from the diaries of Denton Welch. This isn’t wholly imagination either, as it turns out that there was a camp here during the war for American airborne troops, which makes the survival of these wonderfully elaborate pillars, still here despite all that ...”

“... protection of press freedom and Nixon’s resignation, was an article by Ted Sell on the front page of the Los Angeles Times of 30 September 1969 entitled ‘Murder Charges against Green Berets Dropped by Army’. From it Ellsberg learned that the Secretary of the Army, Stanley Resor, had ordered the military commander in Vietnam, General Creighton ...”

“... figures have taken a swing at it, in one-offs or batches, including Pound, Beckett, Lowell and Norman Cameron. There have also been the thorough, proselytising translators, above all Wallace Fowlie, who wanted the whole oeuvre turned into English and the legend retold to Anglophone readers. And there was Edgell Rickword, in whom the two strands coincided ...”

“... practice. We know where it went – he was buying up land in Arcis. The evidence was marshalled in Norman Hampson’s 1978 biography, a wry, spare and careful assessment. Where others see a calculating opportunism running through Danton’s revolution, Lawday sees a man free from ‘demon ideals’ and driven by ‘impetuosity and heart’. At any rate, he was ...”

“... and dangerous became more and more part of her legend. ‘Giving a camera to Diane,’ Norman Mailer said, ‘is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.’ In 1962, she began to use a Rolleiflex instead of a Nikon. The advantage wasn’t merely that the Rollei could register more detail but that it could be held at waist level. ‘The ...”

“... you have not chosen to fight – abandoned Danton when he could do nothing more for him. But as Norman Hampson says elsewhere, the Danton of legend is hard to resist, especially since he imposed himself on contemporaries as well as posterity. After his death this well-read, greedy, secretive lawyer became a sort of roaring boy, a ...”

“... are all very well, but these advocates of ‘Management by Walking Around’ (MBWA) are topped by Norman Augustine, a former President of the American Institute of Aeuronautics and Astronautics, who has come up with 52, one for each week of the year. Augustine’s Laws uses its axioms to mock bureaucratic routine, state regulation of economic ...”

“... with no prompts, straight into their faces, in a word-perfect articulation of the printed page. No fumbling with sheets of paper, no mumbled apologies – the business. There’s been nothing in the annals of performance art to match this tension since Jack the Hat barracked Dorothy Squires in the same gaff, back in the Sixties. The dump was known ...”

“... during Defoe’s lifetime between a pamphleteer and the bookseller whose name appears on the title-page. Often the name listed is that of a ‘trade publisher’, a kind of wholesaler, who did not buy copyrights or deal with authors directly. His presence or absence, or his implied testimony, will take us nowhere near the rightful owner of a given work. In a ...”

“... then, going back almost to the beginning, there was the matter of those initials on the dedication page of The City and the Pillar. This homoerotic drama, Vidal’s second novel, won him attention and execration in about equal measure. The dedicatee was one ‘J.T.’ Just a few feet away from that marble slab in Rock Creek, one can discover a small grey stone ...”

“... familiar idiom, one of ‘the less deceived’. Even though we haven’t even got to the contents page, we’re starting to catch a whiff of the ‘no bullshit’ bullshit that is one of Hitchens’s trademarks. The epigraph is from Proust and, being from Proust, is a paragraph long. It is about one kind of genius, genius as ‘reflecting power’, the kind ...”

“... his context, is that of a point of departure: art is an escape, a flight of speech to the printed page, where the reader’s imagination is free to encounter the writer’s; biography moves in the opposite direction, dissolving text back into conversation, returning the writer to his ‘household’, reincarnating his family, bringing him back to earth. The ...”