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“... Boston University. The first of them, a satirical attack on The Old Faith and the New, a work of David Strauss’s dotage (1871, English translation 1873), begins with a memorable disclaimer. The German public’s eagerness to infer from the military victory over France a victory over ...”

“... record after her pet pit bull gored a child (the dog escaped the chop thanks to the Princess’s top-dollar brief). Even Prince William, once the press’s golden boy, was reported to have dispatched flunkeys to buy him porno mags from the local newsagent. Then came bruits of rape within the precincts of Buckingham ...”

“... email was hot with people wanting more.’ Even then Sansom thought the book might flop, so he began another, set in 1930s Spain. As it turned out, Dissolution (2003) was a bestseller and a sequel was commissioned. He completed his Spanish Civil War novel, Winter in Madrid (2006), anyway. Since then he has published another modern thriller, Dominion ...”

“... the one with the handbag, the one with the cowboy hat, and then their grey successors. We were so happy when those fresh-faced challengers, the Blair/Brown and Clinton/Gore double acts, showed them the door. People smarter than I was probably foresaw the compromises that would follow, but I doubt any of us fully ...”

“... taking the salute at a victory parade, have made it hard to remember why it all at first seemed so comic. But the early incredulity often made points which were lost when solemn passions took over. I remember an editorial conference, the Task Force scarcely beyond Finistère. Rights and wrongs had not yet come into the discussion; the argument was between ...”

“... helicopters. We could drive there in forty minutes, but travel by road is far too dangerous. So we just wait, and spend the day trying to avoid the heat, which is impossible because the air-conditioning in the tent doesn’t work. One Naafi serves the entire base, with a dry bar and a small supermarket. But the generator can only power half the building ...”

“... in dispute. These post-colonial specks in the South Atlantic were, supremely, a diplomat’s preoccupation. Yet not the smallest virtue of Mr Charlton’s important book is the evidence it summons up which shows that the Palliser thesis is only half-right. For decades, the people may have been ignorant, but the ...”

“... designed, bound and typeset by its publishers – represents the merest sliver of Mavis Gallant’s lifelong achievement. Even discounting the two novels and the books of essays, what we have here can amount to little more than half the content of her nine published short-story collections. Gallant has made the selection herself, rejecting ‘straight humour ...”

“... by only a year, one of them in the exhibition of his photographs of the Crimean War at the Queen’s Gallery in Edinburgh (until 26 November) and the other not. The first, from 1854, seems conventional: we see a Victorian gentleman – hair parted, beard trimmed to cover only the underside of his face, leaving the strong chin to fight its own battles ...”

“... little public client and university appendage. As someone noted, a little gnomically (but it’s the truth), ‘Beckmann was time.’ He was successful early, painting John Martin-like catastrophes on a huge scale: visionary, awful, sandy things. The first monograph on him appeared before the First World War, when he was still in his twenties. In the ...”

“... because of a hope that Trump would nominate justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the court’s decision guaranteeing (at least in theory) women’s right to abortion.The gambit paid off. Trump filled Scalia’s seat with Justice Neil Gorsuch. Soon after, Justice Anthony Kennedy ...”

“... he called his ‘pet lamb’ – as her excuse for favouring my sister, saying that my father had so totally appropriated me, their first-born, with his adoration that, when they had a second child, she had no alternative to loving her more than he did and more than she did me. She was so blithely innocent about normal ...”

“... first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental: It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write. ...”

“... too many times. That meant I would have to take the ferry, across the neck of one of the world’s largest natural harbours. After a jolting truck ride, I found myself at the edge of a concrete pier, watching the sun-set through the haze, waiting for the boat. Fishermen poled their pirogues onto the brown strip of beach. A ...”

“... nuns. It was a Time-Life edition with an embroidered cover by Leo and Diane Dillon, a cover so beautiful it stayed on the eye and swam over the yellowing pages. I read it till the spine cracked and never returned it; it is next to me right now. I only stole the books that baffled me, the ones I couldn’t seem to solve. She was born Lula Carson Smith in ...”