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“... Lawrence, is ‘about envisaging a possible socialist future for England’. It plots protagonist Philip Kane’s brush with Woman (in the guise of Anne, a smoking, free-loving acolyte of the feminist, socialist and gay sociologist, Edward Carpenter) and with Soviet Communism (in the guise of the Russian exile, Ivan Smirnoff, a barfly and violinist, whose ...”

“... and he had made it so.’ His elegance is much admired. In the Twenties he has ‘his hair short, slicked down and impeccably parted, tie nonchalantly neat, white handkerchief fashionably ruffled’. In 1940 he impresses the Ministry of Information with his perfect dark-blue suit. On a visit to New York in 1945 he loses a trunk containing six of his ...”

“... literary scene were anti-Stalinist socialists who defended Trotsky. In 1937 William Philips and Philip Rahv had revived Partisan Review as a left-wing anti-Stalinist literary journal. The Committee for Cultural Freedom was founded in 1939 by the philosophers John Dewey and Sidney Hook with a similar programme. Lionel Trilling, James Farrell and Dwight ...”

“... of violent death, whatever the numbers involved, we do tend to demand explanations. Garrigan is short of them. That this should be so, testifies to Foden’s seriousness of purpose. It does mean, however, that at crucial points his novel has a flatness that leaves the reader stranded. Nicholas is a young doctor sent to Uganda to work for the Ministry of ...”

“... Scots when his mother abdicated a month after his first birthday in 1567, and dying several months short of his 59th birthday, he reigned effectively for 57 years. The regal union was unusual in that it was not the direct product of a marriage between heirs, but involved the succession of a King then aged 37 to a virgin Queen who had reigned for almost half a ...”

“... Union, his fourth adult novel, he plays with two genres: the counterfactual, derived from Philip K. Dick; and the noir thriller, derived from Chandler and Hammett. The counterfactual is all in the background. The thriller is all in the foreground. The thematic link between the two is the endlessly precarious nature of Jewishness. Two years ...”

“... the late ‘my mother-in-law’ British comedian Les Dawson). Somehow, I am always drawn to these short, pyknic or mesomorphic creators, whether they are Brodsky, Benn, Beckmann or my father. As the Nazis came up things grew abruptly tight for Beckmann. He lost his job in Frankfurt (‘public funds for Jew lackeys like Beckmann’), was pilloried in the press ...”

“... and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she took her MFA. She has published two books of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005) and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (2010), and two novels, The Vagrants (2009), which seems to me one of the first masterpieces of our stumbling century, and Kinder than Solitude (2014), and now a book of ...”

“... and end up asking: ‘really, must I think about all of this/a second time in this short life? … must I grieve it all again?’ Her jump cuts and exclamations say how absurd, how impossible, an ordinary adult life can seem; such a life must be lived within incompatible timescales, at once attending to the present moment, and planning for the ...”

“... to forced labour and internal exile: ‘an era of forbidden books’, as she puts it in a short afterword to Haywire, ‘books that were victims of the cultural revolution, mostly translated Russian classics: Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and sometimes an American like Walt Whitman’. Constantine again: ‘Her poetry has little connection to poetic ...”

“... In Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), the five-year-old Infanta Margaret Theresa, daughter of Philip IV of Spain, has a precociously manipulated figure, her little torso moulded into a triangle above the ballooning shape of her tiered skirt. Promoters of female dress reform (‘healthful underdressing’) in the 19th century stressed the disastrous ...”

“... of supplication – cue long flattering speech outdoing Demades? – are, in Arrian, curiously cut short. And what has happened to the famous description of Tyre? It would be nice to know, at any rate, what was so distasteful about the inscription that Alexander wrote on the ship he dedicated to Heracles after the conquest, ‘either his own composition or ...”

“... Netherlands in the years between 1550 and 1672, from the dreadful spoliations of Charles V and Philip II to the deadly invasion of Louis XIV, a period comprising the Great Dutch Revolt, under the Princes of Orange and Nassau, the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) that resulted in the independent Dutch Republic, and the infamous Thirty Years War ...”

“... Labour: the Labour Party under Mr Blair more closely resembles the party of Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden than one kitted out for the Nineties. Inevitably, given its strategy, the most obvious characteristic it shares with Very Old Labour is timidity and a wish to be thought acceptable by the existing élites. One form of this is New Labour’s ready ...”

“... a model for royal biography successfully followed by Lady Longford on Queen Victoria, Sir Philip Magnus on Edward VII, Lady Donaldson on Edward VIII, James Pope-Hennessy on Queen Mary and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett on George VI. Now the wheel has come full circle, and we are back to George V again. Is there any need for this? If plain history does not ...”