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“... declared their outrage at Nimeiri’s spiral into religiosity and repression. The crowds who took to the streets to celebrate his fall, dancing in ecstasy where a few days before they had been tear-gassed by security police, reviled Nimeiri, calling for his execution and shouting ‘Return October!’ – a reference to the coup in October 1964 that ...”

“... The psychologist John Layard – ‘Loony Layard’, as he is affectionately termed in one of Auden’s early poems – is said to have told a submarine officer that he had grown a beard as a masculine protest against the mechanical womb he inhabited. And in Portrait of the Artist a young man informs his friend that he admires, the Venus de Milo because her broad hips show she would be good at bearing his children ...”

“... claim to be remembered for his efforts in securing democracy, freedom of speech and fairness was John Wilkes, the subject of Arthur Cash’s informative and enjoyable new biography. Now that ‘high politics’ is taught less and less in schools and universities, Wilkes’s great political achievements, which included lowering the tone of high politics, are ...”

“... The novel is a natural vehicle for superiorities. In an age which took competition for granted, the novelist possessed a means of distancing himself, morally, socially and sexually, from his contemporaries; and many of them seized the opportunity, D.H. Lawrence no less than Jane Austen. That establishing and disengaging of the self became in the 19th century more and more a part of the classic writer’s instinct, and merges with the novel’s own unique form of self-therapy ...”

“... have done well to heed his own advice. In No Ordinary Man, Dominic Carman exposes the lawyer who took his court victims to task for their moral turpitude as an alcoholic, gambling, bisexual, wife-beating, impotent, chain-smoking monster. Where there is no available evidence to support an allegation, the son is always gamely prepared to speculate wildly, at ...”

“... wave after wave of Americans, they think they own the bloody planet. Maybe the extra sedative I took last night – blemish in the mirror – who’s that blond person looking sideways at me, that gigolo look, as if I was someone special – uh-uh, ‘blond’ disqualified by a lack of the terminal gender indicator ‘e’ – Perec’s lipographic novel ...”

“... by the 1850s, when William Russell was reporting from the Crimea for the Times and his editor, John Delane, was fulminating against the mismanagement of the war, nobody could argue with it. ‘This country is ruled by the Times,’ the Saturday Review declared. ‘We all know it, or if we do not know it, we ought to know it.’ Once, governments had ...”

“... who’d snared a rich old man, she was also London’s first female tycoon. When Coutts died she took over and expanded his financial empire. The first Nell Gwyn had been the monarch’s mistress. This one was his banker. Phenomenal – but not altogether exceptional. New money, fuelling upward social mobility, abounds in Rubinstein’s pages. Some was ...”

“... letters from Paris survive, and so far as I know there is nothing in them to suggest that he took Marlowe with him. Riggs’s conjecture is supported by the names of the members of the Privy Council who signed the Marlowe letter, most of whom were promoters of the peace talks. I think he is warm but not hot, because we are looking for a messenger, and in ...”

“... and destruction seems to have brought pleasure to some of the perpetrators – many of them took photographs showing their victims with severed heads or limbs. Despite this savage repression, resistance to the Italians continued. In fact, the strategy of massacres backfired, pushing the Church in Ethiopia (what remained of it) into a much more active ...”

“... would have dryly agreed with all that. Like her fellow Acmeists, Gumilev and Mandelstam, she took a down-to-earth view of the process, although none of them would have gone along with the English Movement’s stylised derision of high culture and classy ‘foreign muck’. For Mandelstam, Acmeism meant ‘the essentialising in poetry of world ...”

“... was at last so saucy, that the Justice found he was half-Drunk, and set him in the Stocks, and took care afterwards to have him punish’d too for some other Mis-Behaviour; but all the Justice or the Clothier cou’d do, cou’d not make him finish his Piece of Work, till he pleas’d, and that was a good while after.’ The fictional putdown is ...”

“... John le Carré has patiently established himself over the last twenty-five years as the discriminating reader’s favourite thriller writer. The BBC’s adaptations of the George Smiley trilogy in 1979 and 1982 made him almost overnight a popular author on the Ian Fleming scale, and it can have done no harm that the TV version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy coincided with the Blunt scandal ...”

“... has been damaged beyond repair by war. Leon volunteered for the US Marines, fought in Vietnam, took part in a My Lai-type operation in which 59 villagers were killed, deserted to Sweden, became a ship-worker, was decapitated by a falling sheet of metal (lost his big brain, as the novel would put it), became a ghost haunting the boat which is to be ...”

“... the last American Presidential contest. This import-import business started in 1952 when a certain John Profumo – then the Tories’ media man – visited the US during the Presidential election and came back dazzled by what he had seen. It was, he wrote to the Party Chairman on his return, ‘absolutely essential to get all our people on all the programmes ...”