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“... Selby and McCruiskeen: fantastic, jaunty and terrifying. And yet O’Nolan is not without issue. John Banville’s most recent novel, The Book of Evidence, catches unmistakably the voice and fate of the unnamed narrator of The Third Policeman. Both are murderers, laconic, fastidious, their imaginations stunned. Both find themselves in ‘a queer ...”

“... Designed to keep the hair from obscuring the vision, it was pulled so tight that, as the veteran John Shipp testified, a soldier could scarcely open his eyes. The Tsar’s soldiers had their queues stiffened by iron bars. But the most hated item of equipment was the neckstock, a kind of heavy leather cravat intended to force the soldier’s head erect ...”

“... is the route by which d became t?’ Changing states attract Prynne’s attention much as they did John Donne’s. Here we don’t get ‘gold to ayery thinnesse beat’ or flesh ‘calcined’ into dust. Instead we have syrups, doughs, pastries, and snow that melts into slush: images of reconstitution and dissolution. The first volume included in Poems is ...”

“... circumstances coincide or perhaps Shaw was alluding to Mozart, his ‘master beloved by masters’, some of whose letters were known, though a collected edition did not appear until 1914. The 21-year-old Mozart reported to his father in 1778 that he had tried to compose an aria (K.294) for the tenor Anton Raaff, but, deciding it would go better for ...”

“... slashing review and the brief glory of a television panel. James’s creatures are Shadbold’s masters, a different galaxy, a pride of publishers, producers, stars and ancient European aristocrats – something like the David Frost Show done by Visconti. Everyone is beautiful except the gossip columnists, and they have all the appropriate faults, from ...”

“... admiration for the Poles. I remember, one Sunday morning, watching the installation of Pope John Paul II with Foucault and a friend – all three of us ex-Catholics – on Michel’s minuscule black-and-white television set. I was struck at the time by the fascination with which he watched the proceedings. Quite apart from delight in the ‘camp’ of ...”

“... feudal travellers preparing special meals in special kitchens and bearing them direct to their masters, cutting out the ship’s stewards, a Cunard carry-on I did not know about until I read Philip Dawson’s The Liner. Perhaps such things also happened aboard the ‘ocean greyhounds’ of the Axis. Hitler’s dashing duo were the Bremen, which had a ...”

“... a mini-parliament, with its members divided into the three estates of apprentices, journeymen and masters, masons saw their movement as the champion of enlightened conduct: fraternity, benevolence, conviviality and, above all, English liberty. The ‘Royal Art’, so its Constitutions proclaimed, had been practised by the ‘free born ... from the beginning ...”

“... merely quaint. His legacy hasn’t worn well. Compared with his closest American contemporaries, John Singer Sargent (also working in England), Thomas Eakins (determinedly homebound) and Mary Cassatt (moving between France and America), Whistler seems lightweight. He possessed neither Sargent’s bravura as a portraitist at the centre of the Anglo-American ...”

“... numbers, and was accustomed to make confident statements entirely without adequate data.’ So John Wyclif’s claim in the 1370s that Oxford had once had 60,000 students but that after the Black Death the number had fallen to fewer than 3000 can be confidently dismissed. The estimate of 98,000 post-invasion excess deaths in Iraq, made by Les Roberts and ...”

“... Coleridge’s​ favourite novelist, John Galt, had a gift for encapsulating disgrace under pressure, and his novels of small-town Scottish life are among the early masterpieces of British political fiction. After a life of robust colonial effort, during which he founded the Canadian city of Guelph, Galt – exhausted and impoverished – came back to Greenock and died there in 1839 ...”

“... in 1878, but fled Russia at the time of the Revolution, having studied with a number of esoteric masters in Russia and Asia, most notably with Gurdjieff. One of the earliest results was the treatise Tertium Organum, which Ouspensky first wrote in Russian. A revised version, translated by Claude Bragdon and published in 1921, became a New York ...”

“... tableau of a secular scene, the bourgeois mode of ‘a window on the world’ (which John Berger once associated with a safe on the wall), or a modernist painting of pure abstraction (which, despite the frequent claims of autonomy made on its behalf, is usually a commodity on the wall too). Like many others, Nagel sees a gradual breakdown of this ...”

“... that the union game was up. Yavlinsky accused Gaidar of tailoring his views to suit the new masters. Ideally, the new men would have wanted to get Yavlinsky on their side, but they were too far apart. Until everything collapsed with Gorbachev’s resignation at the year’s end, Yavlinsky went on working away at futile agreements. Gaidar and his ...”

“... Maconochie, who arrived in Hobart in 1837 as secretary to a new governor, the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin. Like Macquarie, he soon drew attacks from those who wanted no reforms. Scots tended, it would seem, to be either worse than the common run of English functionaries, or far superior. But between the place of Scotsmen and Irishmen in Australia there ...”