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“... doorstopper – the ‘encyclopedic’ novel – which includes such celebrated behemoths as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) and Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997). Although mustering a meagre 482 pages to their 1079 and 827, The Last Samurai is vauntingly expansive in both form and ambition. As a subgenre, the encyclopedic novel develops ...”

“... property of historians rather than of the population at large. One of these academic devotees is David Hackett Fischer, the author of Albion’s Seed, a major and much-admired work dealing with the different British cultural streams that went into early American development. A professor at Brandeis University near Boston, he lives in the town of ...”

“... Slessor’s good works on the Upper Niger still earn her an image on Scottish banknotes, while David Livingstone became the world’s best-known Scotsman. They did not save many souls. After 50 years’ work in India, the missions could show only 3359 converts. But their influence on empire was deep and paradoxical, at once the advance guard of colonialism ...”

“... the letter to a number of acquaintances, some of them prominent, such as the jurist George Joseph Bell and the scientist Sir David Brewster, and some of them obscure. Close friends used to forgather with him at the house of Woodhall in the lea of the Pentland Hills, where the letter was written. The house was that of the ...”

“... Anyone who wants to leave their room for any reason must summon a maid, who then rings a ‘great bell’ heard all over the house, which is ‘the signal for everyone to keep in close quarters’. ‘The same formalities were observed on the arrival of new guests, and thus people could go in and come out without being seen by one another, though there was a ...”

“... contemporary novel, has been a mighty matter, looming large. Who will forget the narrator of The Bell Jar seeing an adult penis for the first time and being both fascinated and repelled? (‘The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.’) Or Fermina Daza, in a darkened room in García Márquez’s Love in ...”

“... revealed. As Holroyd says, the appalling monster-bores of Hamilton’s pub, the Midnight Bell (which is also the title of the trilogy’s first volume), ‘divert us by driving the other characters to distraction’, as they pursue their inanely meticulous little ploys. They are all around us, not shown from a distance. As Keats remarked of his ...”

“... gonna write a blues song for fighters. It’ll just be for slow guitar, soft trumpet and a bell.’ So said Sonny Liston in 1962, after he’d beaten his closest rival, Floyd Patterson, and become Heavyweight Champion of the World. Liston was not known for his sensitivity. Indeed, the facts of his life read like a blueprint for a Hollywood film of the ...”

“... the famous seizing of the handbell on the Conference podium: reciting Donne, he declared that the bell was tolling for the Labour Party and brought an audience of four thousand to their feet. (He was so pleased with the effect that he gave a repeat performance at Blackpool the following year.) Over time the image of Hogg and the ...”

“... immigrants (over eight million) than any other state, and which is conventionally regarded as a bell-wether state, will no longer have any ethnic majority. Latinos and ‘Anglos’ will each make up about 40 per cent of the largest state’s population (around 35 million). Asians, at more than 10 per cent, will outnumber blacks. Small wonder that in the ...”

“... David Jones was staying in the Chelsea flat of the BBC’s Assistant Director of Programme Planning, Harman Grisewood, as the bombs fell on London in the autumn of 1940. During one raid, a near miss blew a bus off course; it went through the window of Sainsbury’s on the King’s Road. ‘I was going out to see if I could do anything,’ Grisewood reported ...”

“... le Carré knew one another, but doesn’t see fit to add that le Carré – under his real name, David Cornwell – illustrated one or two of Knight’s post-war publications (e.g. Talking Birds, 1961): a not uninteresting detail in a story that includes spies and intrigues among its ingredients, just as le Carré’s do. Then, there’s an episode ...”

“... wealth on art. There were similar attacks all over Europe, from the British Isles to the Balkans.David Freedberg, who teaches art history at Columbia (and who was, long ago, my dissertation adviser), describes himself as ‘haunted’ by the question of what it is about art that arouses such fierce responses. Most academic art history considers the social ...”

“... past. The extraction and analysis of ancient DNA from human skeletal remains, the field in which David Reich is a leading researcher, is a technical advance that eclipses the advent of radiocarbon dating in the 1950s, and is already transforming our knowledge, not only of human biological evolution, but also of human history and culture. The potential value ...”

“... their enemies. On one side is a country which consists of charming, sometimes simple souls, Toby Bell of the Foreign Office and, simplicissimus, Sir Kit Probyn, late of the Foreign Office. Seldom can a department of state have done so much for the casting of a fiction. Each is a little like that rural innocent of Evelyn Waugh’s who was sent to Africa with ...”