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“... world of Eilis Lacey is a little like the inner world of Tóibín’s previous hero – the Henry James of The Master (2004). Like James, Eilis Lacey has a novelist’s eye for detail. Here is how she responds to her first glimpse of Mrs Kehoe’s sitting-room: She saw an old gramophone and a wireless in another corner and ...”

“... to give them extra zest’, while the Man Group is an investment management business, though the James Man who founded the original company was an 18th-century barrel-maker (his firm supplied the navy with rum for almost two hundred years). Touches such as Elysian’s ‘Giraffe carrot’, so large that a single specimen can fill a vegetable dish for Sunday ...”

“... subject of a private prosecution brought by Mr Taylor against the Chief Constable of Manchester, James Anderton, which is due to be heard at Bury Magistrates Court in December: at a hearing in Manchester in October, Mr Taylor was refused information as to the grounds for setting up the investigation. This began with the familiar pattern of police ...”

“... are the only characters credited with any lasting vitality. But Jack, in Harriet’s eyes, is pure Mills & Boon. Thanks largely to his jeans, his leather jacket and his flat in Bloomsbury (the others all live at easily verifiable addresses in SW3), he comes on in this genteel context like the rough-trade hero of romantic fiction. Jack treats his ...”

“... serving as fancy dress; a razor slipping and a GI getting castrated at a drunken homosexual orgy; James Dean being roped in for a one-night stand; Zsa Zsa Gabor getting her famous black eye from Hutton-fancier Rubirosa (after whose magnificent appendage smart restaurants named their giant pepper mills). Curiously blind to ...”

“... distinguishing between parody and imitation. Take the terrible title: is the author having a go at Mills & Boon? Or not? Is Dr Donovan – twice the age of Gretchen, and mutely besotted with her – meant to be considered risibly romantic, or just romantic? It’s hard to tell. What’s certain is that the narrative tone, effectively deadpan in places, can ...”

“... of them. I even have to will myself to watch modern film or TV adaptations of Dickens, Trollope or James, and when it comes to Jane Austen adaptations, I refuse. This is not because I’m an anti-television snob. I watch TV and box sets of popular drama series in greedy excess. Westerns, thrillers, political, medical, legal and science fiction are welcome even ...”

“... and casting themselves as intrepid explorers or scientific investigators; or slumming journalists (James Greenwood, Jack London, Robert Sherard and, later, Orwell) trying to share an experience that they could never penetrate because they knew they could always escape. And there was Dickens, who lived in denial about his childhood labour in a blacking factory ...”

“... century, he spent the rest of his working life. This sort of thing was not totally unknown. Both Mills had sojourned in the India Office. But it was not truly what Arnold wanted, although his mother wanted it, and after Kay-Shuttleworth’s departure from the education office he came under less obliging heads. Ralph Lingen, who remembered him from Balliol as ...”

“... nature was also the careerist who desperately sought public office, working his way up to become James I’s lord chancellor, only to be brought down by his political opponents on a charge of corruption. It used to be said that there was no connection between Bacon’s intellectual life and his public career. Macaulay set the pattern for this interpretation ...”

“... 1850 provoked nationwide mourning. Unlike earlier great statesmen – Pitt the Younger and Charles James Fox – Peel attracted a cult following which transcended party and transcended class. Why? Read suggests two main reasons. First, Early Victorian technology allowed ideas and opinions to penetrate the nation more extensively and more rapidly than ever ...”

“... as we find in Louis MacNeice’s enumeration of the egregious inheritances of Ulster: The linen mills, the long wet grass, the ragged hawthorn. And one read black where the other read white, his hope The other man’s damnation: Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope, And God Save – as you prefer – the King or Ireland However, one of the most important ...”

“... represents a departure from an earlier tradition. ‘As long as you think you’re white,’ James Baldwin once said, ‘there’s no hope for you.’Attempts to dismantle racism have often subverted its vocabulary, turning epithets into appellations of pride. But anti-racist intellectuals have also been alert to the risk of nativism, of falling deeper ...”

“... fit easily with the mainstream English novel from Austen and Thackeray to George Eliot and Henry James. The Brontës are a long way from the genial, civilised, ironic tones of that tradition. Perhaps this is partly because they were only half English, and their father came from a country whose literature was always more Gothic or Romantic than realist. They ...”

“... attributing the coinage to Simon Sebag Montefiore (elsewhere it is attributed to Professor James Matisoff, a celebrated coiner of neologisms). But however we wish to describe it, the phenomenon is achieved, if not quite without firing a shot, at least without the deployment of huge armies or indeed of organised nation states. Only briefly under the ...”