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“... enjoyable new history of the Protectorate, which collapsed nine months after Cromwell’s death, Paul Lay is bracing and undeceived in his judgments. He is the editor of History Today, and he writes in the best tradition of that magazine, accessible but sound in detail, with an alert eye for the significant details academic historians sometimes slide ...”

“... up.’ ‘With your father’s wonderful wit too, I see!’ she said. I looked up and saw that Paul, her son, who was at my school but a year older, was sitting at the top of the stairs, behind the bannisters. He was smiling at me. On the way to Cheryl’s I’d deliberately excluded him from my mind. I hadn’t believed that he would be in, that he would ...”

“... really, does it mean?’ The novel’s meaning emerges from its study of twinship. Jean and Paul Surin are twins so identical that even their father cannot tell them apart: their physical similarity is coupled with an emotional and psychological identification, not of sympathetic reactions but of a shared geminate intuition – a phrase always ...”

“... small square with its switched-off fountainwas carding the winds from east and west.A soiled earl lay toppled from his plinth.It was rather grim, being lost like thisbut fun as well. Correctly we guesseddownhill should lead to the creaking docksand docks would always overlook the sea.Across the sea was another land.And across that land was another sea,though ...”

“... your wordsmay release us into gesture –or so I tell myselfas I scribble these rough numbersand lay my little wreath:I got to meet you, once,and gave my name for silenceand ‘best wishes, Derek Mahon’.My Life on Earth remembers.The WellSo what. He told a lie. So what.It explained a thing or two about a thing or two.It wasn’t anything that somebody else ...”

“... But Michael Howard belongs to the old school of public historians who sought both to interest a lay audience and instruct them in the ‘lessons of history’. If this takes him into a realm where the arts of rhetoric cut across the kind of analysis expected in the seminar room, and history is employed as a parable to point a contemporary message, he is ...”

“... title ‘Yale Scholar’s Articles Found in Nazi Paper’. The scholar in question was the late Paul de Man, who had written these pieces during the early Forties before leaving Belgium for America. They were published in Le Soir, a newspaper of pro-Nazi sympathies, and contain many passages that can be read as endorsing what amounts to a collaborationist ...”

“... the tale of the hunter who, having caught and decapitated his boar, hung the head in a tree and lay down to rest in its shade. The head fell down and killed him while he slept. The boar is formidable even when dead. Allied to his armament is the boar’s bulk. Sus scrofa, as Linnaeus dubbed him, favours all terrain south of the 57th parallel. Wild boars are ...”

“... One of the most triumphant television productions of the decade was ITV’s dramatisation of Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’ under the title The Jewel in the Crown, a testament to the uneasy. Forster-like imperial conscience of a pre-Thatcherite age. In foreign affairs, Mrs Thatcher’s experience was slight ... This is masterly. The introduction of ...”

“... works – the Songs without Words for piano, the symphonies, above all the choral spectaculars St Paul and Elijah – through which that world could know itself. He was, if reluctantly, an adornment to the Prussian court of Frederick William IV, and a willing favourite of Queen Victoria. Innumerable biographies of all sizes have been published since his ...”

“... pages, as Ford has with Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), The Lay of the Land (2006), Let Me Be Frank with You (2014) and now Be Mine, and still find him incalculable.Bascombe himself is scathing about knowability: ‘Character, to me, is one more lie of history and the dramatic arts. In my view, we have only what we did ...”

“... as an active intelligence officer had been passed. No one had rumbled him or questioned him. He lay back on his bunk in relief. Suddenly the tannoy blared out a message: ‘Will Captain Fred Holroyd please report to the Purser’s Office as he has been chosen to be the military families’ officer for the journey.’ ‘So much for undercover work!’ he ...”

“... runs from heart to head, ruptured. Almost all such ruptures end in death, and for many weeks I lay in a coma. When I came round, expertly patched up but still without much prospect of recovery, I was plagued by hallucinations. Chief among these was the heroic speech I had made not about Kosovo but to the massed ranks of the women’s liberation movement in ...”

“... this the only difference between the two – the door was unlocked. It was a coal hole, and in it lay a filthy infant's mattress. Die Familie Schneider was a clever, deeply nasty piece of work. Its theatricalisation of a terrible memory, frozen in time to be inspected, even inhabited, was also, in its uncanny repetitions, a provocation to whatever memories ...”

“... by Geoffrey Lawrence QC, one of the most skilful advocates of his day, whose normal practice lay in the civil rather than the criminal courts. Not for him the faded Rumpole clichés of ‘I am bound to put it to you, Mr Snooks, that what you are telling My Lord and the jury on your sacred oath in this court is a tissue of lies’: his ...”