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“... him personally it aroused feelings of alienation, the sense of being an exile in his own land. For Thomas Friedman, a Jewish American journalist, the refugee camp atrocities produced ‘something of a personal crisis’ and tore away ‘every illusion’ he had ‘ever held about the Jewish state’. And for Robert Fisk, who no longer had illusions about that ...”

“... perhaps, boiling an egg at the time. I’m inclined towards teeth-gnashing, but aspire to being a more balanced person, so I alternated reading the Denis Thatcher story with a rereading of Moby-Dick. A dozen pages of Denis (‘He was happy in his own skin and had played with a straight bat since the day he was born’) over a cup of tea, and then back to ...”

“... nine people ‘that we know about’, and having crippled two others, one of whom (of whom more later) was permanently attached to a respirator in Baltimore. Dr Lecter was being visited by Will Graham, a Special Investigator attached to the FBI, in pursuit of a man who had murdered two families. When Graham arrives at Lecter’s cell, the good doctor ...”

“... undeserved to the fair-minded because he suffered nothing at the hands of his victorious enemy more cruel than he would have inflicted had the same opportunity been his. But if we weigh his defects against his virtues, he was a great man who deserved to be remembered and who needed a Cicero to sing his praises. This balanced epitaph on the statesman ...”

“... Fiction substitutes for reality, as he hunches over his video recorder; but life imitates art far more than the other way round, as the Connor-and-Eaton film prefigures the plot of the Winshaw saga, itself a mélange of sober factology and extravagant fantasy. In Gothic, history weighs like a nightmare on the present; in consumerist capitalism, the present ...”

“... everything, from T-shirts to hotels to cars to weather, and sometimes the colour-coding is even more striking than the soundtrack. Legend has it that the series was born from a studio memo that read simply ‘MTV cops’, and certainly the episodes often look like music videos, an effect enhanced by guest appearances from Phil Collins, Willie Nelson, Little ...”

“... fired as fourth cook on a Boston-to-Washington dining car, and had yet to learn to want anything more than a good time. On any morning that summer, Little might have brushed shoulders with the slender, watchful Ralph Ellison, passing through the Harlem YMCA, where Little roomed for a time only a block away from Small’s. Ellison was preparing himself to ...”

“... wins Whitbread’, ‘Triumph of Thirty-Year Novel’, ‘Jeff’s in the Swing’), or herald more widely Glasgow’s extraordinary swell of literary talent. It seems that in the West of Scotland the sounds of heavy industry have given way to a quite different rhythm, one hammered out on word-processors and tested in literary workshops. With the initial ...”

“... severing the present from the remembered past. And even today, when professional historians seem more concerned to compute the past than to connect it with the present, the histories that readers remember and long to reread are usually those which treat their subjects – no matter how remote – as places the writers remember and long to revisit. Historical ...”

“... in primitive forgery, or mimic it. It is not clear that even an arch literary forger like Thomas J. Wise actually committed a criminal act for which he could be prosecuted by the DPP. It would be sensible to replace the term ‘literary forgery’ with Anthony Grafton’s neologism, ‘pseudepigrapha’. This blanket description would cover everything ...”

“... its nightmare fugues to his Symphonie Fantastique. But this eager congregation makes it all the more puzzling that De Quincey should see himself as opium’s first and only celebrant. There was, after all, no mystery about the drug itself, perhaps the best-known medicine of its day and available in any high-street pharmacy. It was a recourse for pain of all ...”

“... labour. In the 16th century, when the political process rested less on institutions and more on informal networks and shared expectations, a regime was only ever a few steps away from disaster. Robert Cecil knew only too well how much work was required to keep the country stable. He had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, William ...”

“... on her tomb in Westminster Abbey have been carefully polished in the expectation of ever more flower-strewing pilgrims: at this rate she is liable to find herself transferred from her inconspicuous position in the cloisters to the very centre of Poets’ Corner. Unfortunately for Todd, the burgeoning Behn industry in which she has secured such a ...”

“... ruled by the advice of a devil and that his reign would bring destruction to every man’s door. More alarming still, because it was so generally believed, was the rumour that the deposed Richard had escaped from his captivity and was still alive, waiting off the coast of Scotland, ‘in an island called Albion’, until the day appointed for his return in ...”

“... namely, dead bodies or pieces of them – bones, dust, scraps of blood-soaked cloth. So an even more puzzling question arises: why should the holy dead need their mortal remains to do great things? Other cultures and religions have also venerated their dead, whether ancestors in general or a special class of holy persons – Hebrew prophets, Shi’ite ...”