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“... has stuck firmly in the work of popular novelists from Rosemary Sutcliff to Bernard Cornwell and Allan Massie, and (in this case with strident claims to historical accuracy) in movies like Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2004). Fleming ignores the phenomenon, and the scenario. It isn’t the only piece of historical tradition she rejects. Right at the start ...”

“... precious 18th-century automaton in excellent working order: a metre-high machine featuring a cute little quill clasped by a miniature silver hand. When you wind it up, it spends four laborious minutes writing out a Latin formula petitioning God for leisure and material prosperity, which seems a pertinent request under the circumstances. Getty’s star exhibit ...”

“... which introduces us to an older England, from Burton to Kipling; ‘The Americans’, from Edgar Allan Poe to Truman Capote, a culture as far from us in space as is the older England in time; ‘My Contemporaries’, from Ivy Compton-Burnett to V.S. Naipaul, where the richest, funniest and saddest anecdotes are to be found; and a short fourth ...”

“... among immigrants themselves. The number of feminists teaching in the various disciplines also does little to help the case for patriotism, for, not only has patriotism been associated with male chauvinism, it also seems to depend on local, geographical identities, whereas the cause of women generally looks to universal standards of equality and justice. Among ...”

“... bakings and child-mindings is enough to make one sympathise with Coleridge, who when staying at Allan Bank never got up in the morning, ate his dinner in silence and immediately retired again to his room. The comradeship of Nether Stowey days had evaporated, leaving the usual exploitation of enthusiastic women by preoccupied and self-protective men. The ...”

“... poem’s middle stanza, in italics: Me master years a hundred since from my parents sunder’d, A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught, Then hither me across the sea the cruel slaver brought. These lines are a reminder of the extraordinary delicacy and compassion with which Whitman described the pursuit and capture of a ‘hounded ...”

“... written about so often by Vidal’s guests and interviewers, and by Vidal himself, that there is little to say that hasn’t been said. It is a beautiful place, if you like houses perched on cliffs, with an epic view of the Tyrrhenian Sea (somewhere in the hazy distance south of Salerno are the remains of the Greek settlement at Paestum). If you don’t like ...”

“... Daniell wrote a pamphlet on The New Trade Unionism with a handsome Scottish radical called Robert Allan Nicol (a ‘Shelleyan type’), which, rather than discussing pickets, looked forward to ‘the union of the Souls of Mankind in a perfect Love’. Daniell had met Nicol when she was still married, during a trip to Edinburgh for medical treatment in ...”

“... out yet what they were all laughing about after you left the bridge club?’ ‘Even in a charming little town like this one, there was still so much evil in people,’ she thinks as she mails another letter. Franklin compares Jackson to Nathaniel Hawthorne, but the setting of the stories just as often recalls Thornton Wilder – if his plays continued after ...”

“... and culture. The potential value of genetic insights into the past became clear in 1987 when Allan Wilson and his colleagues at Berkeley sampled mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) – a mere 0.0005 per cent of the genome, inherited solely along the maternal line – from living populations and analysed it to show that Homo sapiens, rather than having a ...”

“... other people’s. She’s interested in getting this particular story right. Her prose is full of little assurances, checks, correctives and adjustments, as though to establish things once and for all, to settle the matter. ‘That’s right’; ‘it was actually’; ‘couldn’t we’; ‘didn’t we’; ‘yes we did.’ Everything is pinned ...”

“... biography to date, by Patrick McGilligan, includes plenty of anecdotes about fear, but supplies little by way of evidence of its ultimate cause, and draws no conclusions. Peter Ackroyd, however, is firmly of the Truffaut school. His Hitchcock trembles from the outset: ‘Fear fell upon him in early life.’ At the age of four (or 11, or …), his father had ...”

“... was grossly anti-semitic. Public alarm on the subject was signalled less by the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) than by that ponderous pro-German tract’s making the New York Times best-seller list for 31 weeks. There are always jeremiads on the theme of ‘why Johnny can’t read’ or squibs like Frederick ...”

“... in his encouragement of lesser (or even equal) writers. ‘Was anybody ever better company?’ Allan Gurganus recalls. ‘Ready as he was to laugh, making James Merrill laugh pleased us like a good week’s work. And oh to be thought talented and graceful by the one person alive who was most purely both’. Nights and Days (1966) contains three of ...”

“... The review is unlikely to herald a new commitment to probity in public life.Cameron has said little about all this. In his only public comments so far, made a month after the story first broke, he said the size of his financial interest in Greensill had been ‘massively exaggerated’, but refused to disclose how much he had stood to make from his now ...”