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“... that includes President Eisenhower (who only reluctantly went on TV during his campaigns against a Stevenson who had a patrician disdain for it), President Kennedy (who won the election of 1960 thanks in part to the disastrous appearance of Nixon in the first of the televised debates), and finally Presidents Johnson and Nixon, both of whom were severely ...”

“... man with a backpack getting into a van. The van was being driven by a drug dealer called Oreese Stevenson; inside, they found $21,500 and half a kilo of cocaine. Jenkins took Stevenson’s keys and went to his house, where he found guns, more cocaine and bags of money. He didn’t have a search warrant. He called a ...”

“... At the tail-end of 1892 Robert Louis Stevenson was working on a novel. The book was going well but one thing was bothering him. Serial publication, he felt, might be difficult to secure, since ‘The Justice Clerk’ – it would eventually be published as Weir of Hermiston – was both ‘queer’ and ‘pretty Scotch ...”

“... which passed through the president’s neck and then through the body of the Texas governor, John Connally; and Oswald’s own murder while in police custody at the hands of Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner. Despite these anomalous features, Kennedy’s assassination was – conceptually speaking – a straightforward event. While academic historians ...”

“... which could destabilise Eastern Europe and resurrect Cold War hostilities. In 1998, John Lewis Gaddis bemoaned that the decision to admit Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic was taken with almost no public debate and that ‘with remarkably few exceptions’ historians saw it as ‘ill-conceived, ill-timed and above all ill-suited to the ...”

“... playing over an array of representative lives. He also incorporates a self-portrait in the form of John Garland, a clerk in the RAF struggling to write his first hyper-ironical novel. Garland, we’re told, ‘hated the Air Force. Like 90 per cent of those in the ranks, he had enlisted under the compulsion of hunger and unemployment. He had never forgiven the ...”

“... Oxford who caused him concern’: he believed him to be his illegitimate brother. Her grandfather John Horatio Lloyd had, in the 1830s, ‘exposed himself in the Temple Gardens’ and run ‘naked in the sight of some nursemaids’, thus losing the opportunity to become solicitor-general. He ‘was forced to retire from political and legal work for four ...”

“... in every sense and whatever its troubles, to Seamus Heaney. Some writers – Joyce, Milosz, Stevenson – have to stand well back from the native canvas in order to see the composition, but others dwell inside the painting, loving the paint, the smell of oils and the fine smear of themselves. This new book – written ‘for both with love’ – is ...”

“... also looked after his father’s jobs in Cambridge, probably including the grand new chapel for St John’s College. Then, suddenly, according to Stamp, ‘some of his old Eton friends persuaded him to enter the University.’ At 24, his was a mature admission. He graduated top of the Moral Sciences Tripos for 1866. Next, he won a prize for an essay on ‘The ...”

“... muse lets rip through the rat-a-tat of Blind Hary’s Wallace; and in the brassy Reformation of John Knox it blares even in the sophisticated George Buchanan’s over-the-top ‘Elegy for Jean Calvin’. The volume remains high in some of Robert Fergusson’s sophistic-performative street-talk, Burns’s on-off, rip-roaring ‘Tam ...”

“... night is evoked with much detail, and walk-on cameos by ascertainably ‘real’ 1990 guests – John Major, Richard Rogers, Neil Kinnock and, of course, the richly despised Howard Jacobson. Francis Jay gives an impromptu television interview in which, with all the authority of one who has studied deconstruction at Sussex, he dismisses the shortlisted ...”

“... Ian Rankin’s novel Knots & Crosses introduced us to a tough Edinburgh Detective Sergeant called John Rebus. A series of local girls had been kidnapped and strangled. Rebus – 41-year-old drinker, ex-soldier, failed husband, absentee father, Christian, annual rereader of Crime and Punishment – begins receiving a series of cryptic notes. The first few ...”

“... The American author of the words, Anna Walker, is invoking the declaration of Christ himself (John 9:4): ‘I must work the works of Him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.’ Good works in this general sense could be performed by an invalid Evangelical lady, flat on her back but radiating piety. There has, however, been ...”

“... North Uist’, and Keith Bosley’s ‘Corolla’; Aidan Carl Mathews’s ‘Severances’, and John Levett’s ‘The Photographs of Paris’. The first two are longish, the others shorter. The only one that won a prize – and that the smallest, £100 – is ‘Corolla’, a sequence of nine exactly rhymed and metred sonnets, culminating in a stunning ...”

“... bien pensantes, but to be fair to Gaskell (it’s perhaps too late to start calling her Stevenson – her maiden name) it seldom sounds in her work with our contemporary note of ideological complacence. On the contrary: her prose is always in too much of a rush (her cousin Henry Holland called her charming letters ‘a heterogeneous mass of ...”