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“... a painful business.’ In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Parson Evans attempts to show off William Page’s learning to his mother; but when the boy admits he’s forgotten the declension of his pronouns, the schoolmaster at once threatens him with an educative thrashing: ‘If you forget your “qui”s, your “que”s, and your “quod”s, you must be ...”

“... Berlin) goes on to describe the shooting in some detail. There is a tale like this on almost every page, and very often the true frisson comes more from knowing what Daddy does than from the materials of the debauch. Without the scandalised, high-placed Papas, and without interruption now and then from sceptical oldies like ...”

“... account of the First Crusade, the only eyewitness view from Byzantium, in which she portrays the Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemond with horrified fascination. In a period that witnessed the gradual loss of Asia Minor to the Turks, the emergence of Venice and Pisa as maritime powers and the formulation of holy war ideologies in western ...”

“... This would certainly not have been the opinion of Michelet. It is a very nice point whether it is Norman Hampson’s. When Michelet introduces Saint-Just to his readers he does so with as little enthusiasm as Hampson, showing him calling implacably for the death of Louis XVI and sending shivers of joy through the ranks of a Convention whose favourite speakers ...”

“... the Thatcher Government for allowing them to use British bases. Then it defended the BBC against Norman Tebbit’s criticism of its coverage of the attack on Libya, something that would be inconceivable in today’s Telegraph. The paper abandoned its long-standing support for the Nationalist Government and its apartheid policy in South Africa, and accepted ...”

“... that the KA is a pub (I did know that), then you’re lost. ‘The Dean’ (of Peterhouse, Edward Norman) and ‘the Chancellor’ (of Oxford, Harold Macmillan) are not identified. How many readers will translate ‘My Successor … is not in much favour with your successor … owing to his lack of assiduity in his attendance beneath the portrait of Queen ...”

“... that the live voice, instantly distinguishable as male or female, leaves its imprint on the page? Russian is a language in which, given the laws of grammatical concordance, the lyrical ‘I’ must declare its gender all over the page. I remember Anna Akhmatova’s exasperation when she found, in an American edition ...”

“... in the 1970s, he even confessed that he’d been moved more than he had expected by a visit to Norman Foster’s Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia, an intricate steel and aluminium aircraft hanger cum Greek temple. After Krier left Stirling, he started teaching at the Architectural Association, a private design school in London which during ...”

“... The Archers on Radio 4, so I’m out of touch. I read in the papers that Phil Archer, or at least Norman Painting, who played him, died recently, but is Jill still around? Where’s Shula? What’s with Eddie Grundy? Old Walter Gabriel must be long gone, but what happened to his scapegrace son, Nelson? Are the village shop and post office still open, or does ...”

“... meet. He began his career as a proponent of the non-fiction novel pioneered by Truman Capote and Norman Mailer; his first book, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son (1984), was a painstaking re-creation of the life of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. He topped that with an account of Fred and Rosemary West’s killing careers, Happy like Murderers ...”

“... acknowledging that his true spiritual father is … his father. In the words of the book’s last page: ‘Through his father – who knew nothing of Gorteen, Duntally, Norman towers, and lonely headlands – the uncanny facial resemblance, the poetry, the wild blood had been transferred across the Atlantic Ocean to this ...”

“... function of indexes since the great days of white male writers, when William F. Buckley sent Norman Mailer a copy of his book The Unmaking of a Mayor and wrote ‘Hi!’ in the index next to Mailer’s name. Job’s comforters will want to be the first to tell you that the entry for ‘clocks and sundials’ in your index was printed without the first ...”

“... hands on a computer disc of our unexpurgated expenses claims and has begun publishing highlights. Page after unedifying page . . . The damage is incalculable. Not just to us, but to the entire parliamentary system. We are sinking in a great swamp of derision and loathing. No matter that the guardians of public morality at ...”

“... name, ‘Charles Dickens’. I open the book, and find the same combination repeated on the title page. I have heard of Dickens, and conclude that what I am holding is a novel written by Dickens about a character he has invented and named David Copperfield. I go on to read the book and note the way that every third chapter ends with something of a ...”

“... too much of a stretch, in the age of saints and scholars, that golden, undivided time before the Norman invasion, in which case the cat could be anything at all: the playful cipher, sitting on a very inert, territorial mat. No – scratch all that – this is just a very truthful, very real sentence (look at those nouns!) containing both masculine ...”