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“... an exceptional narrative craftsman, adept at dangling sinister, wormy facts (in this he resembles Ian McEwan, a writer temperamentally close). George tells us, eventually, that he was pushed out of his job as a detective for over-zealous interviewing procedures, that he is divorced, and that his daughter has recently come out to him as a lesbian. If the novel ...”

“... help if we knew where the original bodies were buried. In the first section of Battle-Scarred, Ian Atherton and Stuart Jennings highlight the astonishing scarcity of major civil war burial sites. Two, maybe three, mass graves have been scientifically excavated (they disagree over the identification of a recent big find in York). Parish registers offer few ...”

“... In 1972 the final issue of Ian Hamilton’s Review was given over to a symposium on ‘The State of Poetry’. Only fifteen years on, it has the flavour of a yellowed historical document. The symposium’s tone is embattled: it finds enemies and traitors on every bookshelf, with the whole future of English poetry threatened by sinister forces ...”

“... of his own hollowness. In this sentence, for instance: ‘I loved [my family] in a bred-in-the-bone, sentimental sense, but I didn’t know them any more than I knew the people whose lives I crashed or greased my way into most weeks of the year, whatever I might have preferred to believe.’ Or this one: ‘Without intending to I have put together a yellow ...”

“... sign. Like innumerable other bygones – the last milk bottle on a doorstep, the last rag and bone cart – it’s a sight that disappeared without fanfare. Growing up in West London close to the M4 I would see hitchhikers all the time, and by my late teens I was one of them. The first ride out of town usually dropped me at a motorway service station in ...”

“... memoirs and wistful outsider essays. Black Bill, who appears in the Country Life journalist Ian Niall’s Poacher’s Handbook (1950), is a perfect specimen. He has a black, tousled beard and an over-large jacket and can charm partridges from their roosts with a brass whistle. He also uses raisins to catch pheasants like Danny’s dad in Roald Dahl’s ...”

“... Henry Woodd Nevinson is one of my heroes, the sort of person I dream of being. The champion crusader of Edwardian journalism, he filed pro-Revolutionary articles from Russia in 1905, and pro-Nationalist pieces from India. He won an exhausting battle to expose forced labour on the cocoa plantations of Portuguese Angola. Celebrated as a war correspondent, he started off wanting to fight, and picked up his pen only when he couldn’t persuade his Radical friends to join him in setting up a legion of volunteers to help Greece in its war against Turkey ...”

“... greeted with a gleeful salvo of puns and bon-mots, an echo of which can be heard in the title of Ian Kelly’s splendid new biography. Ever the theatrical opportunist, he was soon back onstage, with a new prosthesis and two new comedies fit for purpose: The Lame Lover, in which he played the lecherous Sir Luke Limp; and The Devil upon Two Sticks, a satire on ...”

“... Here is Dallek’s depiction of Kennedy’s health at an early point in his Presidency: The bone loss and destruction in his lower back from steroids had been the source of back pain since at least 1940. And while the 1954 surgery that his Addison’s disease had made so risky had given him some limited relief, he continued to live with almost constant ...”

“... secretary of the day, Lord Harcourt, tried to warn the cabinet that ‘we could never take the bone out of the dog’s mouth’ – and indeed, Namibia remained South African until 1990. For Smuts this was just a start. From the early 1920s on, he tried to coax Rhodesia into the Union and dispatched missions to report on the situation in Kenya and ...”

“... many years ago, ‘The Triumph of the Word of God in the Life and Literature of John Bunyan’, Ian Paisley praised this ‘dreamer and penman’ for his ‘strong doctrinal’ preaching, his opposition to the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, the enormous crowds he drew, and for his prose style. This ‘poor unschooled tinker’ became, Paisley ...”

“... invented the phrase ‘snobbery with violence’ to describe the school of Sapper and Buchan (and Ian Fleming, for that matter), but then I was told it had been used before, but where and in what circumstances I have forgotten. The form of Forty Years On is more complicated than I would dream of attempting now. It is a play within a play in which the ...”

“... before the stalls of sloganised T-shirts, photocopies of graffiti, leather bags, is called Rag & Bone. No Steptoe operation this, but a retail gallery with three beautifully folded sweaters on a plain table, daring you to search for a price tag.In the fugue of London walking, real feet on unreal ground, we have to deal with that sense of ...”

“... favourites of those who like to suppose that his meanings can be pinned down if only readers will bone up on such things as thermodynamics – a subject about which Pynchon, while majoring in English at Cornell, learned something in his courses on engineering physics. It is a story in which Meatball Mulligan is giving a frantic and exhausting three-day ...”

“... off the west of Ireland. A fair number of Scots manned the ship during the closing months of 1940: Ian Affleck used to work in Kalac’s Cycle and Motor Store in Forfar, and felt he’d been born to help power a ship such as this, named after his own town. Angus McInnes’s father had been a fisherman on the Isle of Harris; Angus had sailed with Forfar since ...”