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“... offered in the end but the evils of their actions, had propagated but the baser instincts, which took root and flourished so effortlessly in this world they called, with a kind of black humour, new.’ The polity of Casquemada begins to collapse and violence, both random and politically-motivated, becomes common. Bissoondath’s delightful talent for the ...”

“... that it would be better not to spread the word about what life was like there?’   ‘Oh, I took that for granted!’ I also stood up. ‘Can I ask you one question?’   ‘Of course, ask away!’   ‘I fear that I may have difficulty getting hired. If they will not take me because of my past, can I turn to you?’   ‘Yes, yes, of ...”

“... Houellebecq, who was born in 1957, has either turned against, or never in the first place took to, the sexual liberalism in which his post-’68 generation grew up. In Whatever he conflates that liberalism in a cursory but effective way with the economic kind, to establish a harsh continuity between the ideology of laisser-faire which operates to ...”

“... the world that The Devil’s Alternative was composed in 44 days (some nine days more than it took him to write The Day of the Jackal, but lest one suspect a weakening of the authorial sinews, he reminds us that the earlier novel was 50,000 words shorter). Patterson asserts that ‘each of his books seldom takes longer than three months to write.’ And ...”

“... technical and aesthetic. Unlike most earlier book illustrators, he worked in wood, not copper. He took a vernacular skill and made it into an art, transforming the rude woodcut which had formerly been relegated to the local tavern wall into an elegantly executed image of sufficient sophistication to find its way into a gentleman’s library. Bewick perfected ...”

“... with the agility of Jack Tar. She easily outlived her son. But during his childhood her ill-health took precedence over his. While she was cossetted, the sickly Lewis (as he was then called) was left to the charge of ‘Cummy’, the nurse who slept in his room until he was ten and who drove him into night terrors that only she could calm. Her entertainments ...”

“... and News from Tartary, which is still better, succeeded so well because their author instinctively took to heart the advice of Dryden’s heroine. We cross Tartary on a daily basis, not so much pleased with seeing more as interested in what can be found to eat, what the weather’s like, how the camels come to reveal their personalities. This is the simplest ...”

“... pine trees and vices of the south’. (Not of the north, interestingly enough. Gothicism never took root in the Scottish background which Sir Walter had made his own, and where even barbarous old custom was healthy and bracing as well as picturesque.) Yet like the Magic Realists Angela Carter used the genre to make her views over-explicit, incidentally ...”

“... drunk at work. Yuri Andropov, the short-lived successor to the lax (and heavy-drinking) Brezhnev, took the KGB route: harassing of drunks. Gorbachev, in his first manifestation as an idealistic back-to-Leninism leader, copied Lenin’s tactic: he banned it. This evokes a passionate denunciation from Pokhlebkin, much of it wholly justified: In the course of ...”

“... describes, in dramatic detail, one exemplary episode from several years past: an evening stroll he took through a field near Salem, Massachusetts, where many ‘supposed bewitchings’ occurred during the famous witch-hunt of 1692. ‘Alone with my thoughts and the night sounds . . . I convinced myself that I believed in Satan and all his evil works ...”

“... to place on record their sense of admiration for the dignity and courage displayed by Mr and Mrs John Profumo and their family in the quarter-century since the episode occurred. ‘This letter,’ they continued, ‘also records our feelings that it is now appropriate to consign the episode to history.’ It was an odd letter and I would be surprised if Lord ...”

“... from the City whose role appeared to be that of prompting the MI5 officer – for that is what I took the man from ‘the office’ to be – when he hesitated over a real or pretended indiscretion. The conversation was all to do with the extent to which the Russian Intelligence Service had penetrated British life. The MI5 officer quickly dispensed with the ...”

“... be it is also one of the more worrying symptoms of a bizarre and poignant neurological disorder. John suffers from dysphasia – or aphasia as it is also called; and it is one of the many paradoxes of his condition that although he can hear perfectly, he cannot monitor what he is saying, or rather not saying. The buffer which in normal speech-processing ...”

“... John White is famous for the drawings he made in the late 1580s which record aspects of the North American littoral: its geography, its inhabitants, their dress, customs and dwellings, and the birds, plants and animals found there. Seventy-five of White’s drawings, along with navigational instruments, maps, books and relics of 16th-century exploration are on show in A New World, an exhibition at the British Museum until 17 June ...”

“... father when Pasmore was 18 threw him off his intended course from Harrow to university; instead he took a job with the London County Council. Painting and educating himself about art in his spare time, he began to exhibit in the 1930s with some of the most prominent interwar painters, including Ivon Hitchens, Ceri Richards and William Coldstream. With ...”