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“... James Meek’s last, bestselling novel, The People’s Act of Love, published in 2005 to great critical acclaim, was set in 1919, in ‘that part of Siberia lying between Omsk and Krasnoyarsk’. Anglophone readers who can locate ‘that’ part of Siberia without a good atlas deserve spot prizes. The historical date and exotic location gave Meek a fictional and cultural space in which extraordinary events and people could seem believable, when placed inside a landscape rendered in exact and first-hand detail ...”

“... was the least productive in the world’s terms, someone whose art simply produced herself: Alice James, sister of Henry and William, Alice with her ‘squalid indigestions’, her ‘spinal neurosis’ and her ‘stomachic gout’. Between them the James siblings shared a hospital full ...”

“... explain. In 1937 Frederic Warburg brought out George Padmore’s Africa and World Peace and C.L.R. James’s World Revolution, 1917-36: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International; both writers, like Williams, were from Trinidad, and both mentored Williams during the years he spent in Britain. But, though a radical, Warburg rejected the manuscript for ...”

“... by doing or seeming to do nothing. It was the fashion. Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin, James Coburn, and in England – and in a different, English way – Michael Caine, seldom did anything else. It was also a manner which could not always be easily distinguished from simple idleness. For the first 25 years of Mitchum’s career, his performances ...”

“... his chronic suspicion that others were plagiarising him or those around him. His loathing of Sir James Mackintosh (’the great Dung-fly’) and of William Pitt are the clearest expressions of self-contempt; his troubles with Charles Lloyd and Thomas de Quincey stem from a mutual or compound confusion of identities; and he ...”

“... America centre-stage in the criminal drama was held by real people – by Billy the Kid or Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickok or Wyatt Earp. The American public expected its lawmen to be colourful popular heroes and the boundary between crime fiction and non-fiction was tenuous indeed. Allen Pinkerton, the most famous detective of the 19th century, was almost an ...”

“... it may not even have been completed. But the enterprise continued and Thomas went on to publish William Temple’s edition of Ramus’s Dialectica, Georg Sabinus’s commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and English and Continental theologians. His intellectual ambitions rose high enough for him to turn out a text of Plato’s Menexenus, the first book in ...”

“... Biography there are photographs of David Niven, Diana Dors, Eric Morecambe, John Betjeman and William Walton. Dors has a leering ‘Come up and read me sometime’ expression on her face and Niven wears his yacht-club greeter’s smile. Morecambe seems to be laughing at one of his own jokes. Amiable images, devised no doubt to lure us into a placidly ...”

“... pleased with themselves, so convinced that they represented sensibility in its highest form. Then William was always stealing Sam’s ideas and appropriating his contacts, with a never-failing air of disinterested benevolence, and in the sacred name of friendship. Robert Southey, Sam’s great friend, Sara’s brother-in-law, another promising young man in ...”

“... Helena Jane and me pack’d in the Family Coach, with Mary Lawless, Mary Smith, Blanchois, and William in another carriage, driving full speed, nine Irish Adventurers, to the French dominions.’ Two at least of these Irish adventurers were as ready as William Wordsworth had been a decade earlier to feel what bliss it ...”

“... totally foreign to their day to day lives’. Venice-on-Thames. The royal parks, such as St James’s and Hyde Park, began opening to the public in the 17th century, while places like the Bear Gardens south of the river offered food and music, as well as bear-baiting, to more unruly customers. But the observant would have noticed something rather ...”

“... parachute that had failed.’ In September 1942, however, the real corpse of Paymaster Lieutenant James Turner, ‘with despatches in his pockets’, turned up in Spanish waters when his RAF seaplane crashed. The Spanish authorities, despite the Falangist government’s debt to the Axis for aiding its victory in the civil war, returned the body to the British ...”

“... Alan Jackson’s London’s Metropolitan Railway (1986), the name Metroland was the inspiration of James Garland, a copywriter in the company’s publicity department, who was laid up with flu but leapt out of bed in high Archimedean excitement when the name entered his head. The public first heard of Metroland in 1915, when the railway used it in a penny ...”

“... is to me’ after seeing a lady on a beach, and perhaps to get over it he swam for miles up the James river against the tide. Pushkin, characteristically, took a more down-to-earth view of girls in rivers. When a friend objected that in his Byronic poem ‘The Captive of the Caucasus’ it was decidedly ungallant of the Russian officer not to attempt to ...”

“... the novel, we should recall that the Anglican Church was widely Calvinist under Elizabeth and James. Cervantes’ Don Quixote, not so far as I know the consequence of a revolution, echoes on into 18th-century fiction, while the great European picaresque novel with its powerfully developed religious strain was, in the hands of the Spaniard Aleman and the ...”