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“... Joseph Chamberlain’s extraordinary career is one good source of answers to those questions. Peter Marsh’s biography is the fifth substantial one in thirty years, but justifies itself on the grounds that it is the first to cover Chamberlain’s whole career in a single volume and to give adequate weight to his business background. ...”

“... the four Queens of Crime who dominated the 1930s – Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L. Sayers – Ngaio Marsh reigns supreme for excellence of style and characterisation,’ writes Margaret Lewis in her introduction. The proposition could be contested; it could be maintained that Christie is ...”

“... who in a Stanley Fishy way has simply asserted his right to authenticate? Floreat emptor. Or as Peter Carey ends his new novel, ‘How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it’s worth?’ Theft: A Love Story, is about just such issues of authenticity and fraudulence in the international art world. As he did in his last novel, My Life as a ...”

“... sit comfortably, invitingly on our shelves, demanding periodic rereading. The list of Ngaio Marsh’s works at the beginning of Photo-Finish omits several books published in the mid-Thirties, which are still in print and are far from shame-making. Miss Marsh must by now have written something like thirty crime stories ...”

“... I’ve read a huge number of these novels over the years, so when I was asked to write about Ngaio Marsh I blithely agreed, not realising that I’d never actually read any of her books. I was convinced I had, but it soon turned out I’d only read part of one when I was 12 or 13; I’d merely registered some of the titles on the spines of the green Penguin ...”

“... his felicities all most promptly divinable’. Under the circumstances, he told Edward Marsh, the poet’s literary executor, he had read Brooke’s war sonnets ‘with an emotion that somehow precludes the critical measure’. Eddie Marsh, too, was greatly struck by Rupert’s ‘radiant, youthful ...”

“... space deals with the history of Fresh Kills, a landfill site covering what was an area of salt marsh on the west shore of Staten Island. It began to be filled with New York garbage in 1948. When legislation was passed in 1995 announcing that it would be closed in 2001, it spanned nearly 2200 acres – about two and a half times the size of Central ...”

“... Crime. For nearly twenty years Ruth Rendell has been hailed as the successor to Sayers, Christie, Marsh and Allingham, perpetuating the old question of why it is that there should be a particularly feminine talent for detective fiction. Her Chief Inspector, Wexford by name, has joined the ranks of legendary police heroes, and although he is Sussex-based he ...”

“... Life of My Choice, a treasure galleon built to the same specifications as Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs. It is the record of a man magnificently and unabashedly out of step with his times; an adventurer imbued, in the words of a superior officer in the Sudan, with ‘an excess of certain ancient virtues ... a brave, awkward, attractive creature’ (a ...”

“... more dissatisfied with its material status than its Continental counterparts appear to be. Alan Marsh of Michigan University has argued plausibly that the co-existence of material with newer non-material concerns is to be explained by the ambition of the new élite to supplant the old. ‘By appearing to speak against their class interest they ... may ...”

“... and I took a holiday house in the West Highlands. The windows of the cottage looked onto a salt marsh, and beyond that, to the fast-moving waters of the Kyles of Lochalsh. Across the waters rose the hills of southern Skye, still dusted with snow. Nearby stood the unloved stone ruin of a barracks built to house government troops engaged on the ...”

“... that his sister was ‘a constant and often sadly-smitten invalid’. Rossetti’s biographer Jan Marsh, however, thought the endless winter scenes and paralysed lives must indicate sexual abuse, which had left a buried self-loathing cruelly reinforced by her Tractarian spirituality.Rossetti wondered herself at the contrast between her intensely gloomy output ...”

“... Queensland in the early 1970s was, according to the narrator of Peter Carey’s new novel, ‘a police state run by men who never finished high school’. This intriguing throwaway remark turns out to be not much of an exaggeration. For twenty years from 1968, Queensland was controlled by the corrupt, gerrymandering state governor Joh Bjelke-Petersen, variously described as the Hillbilly Dictator, a ‘bible-bashing bastard’ and – by himself – as ‘a bushfire raging out of control ...”

“... there were 280 dead. The aftermath into which he’d stumbled, after ‘30 miles of plough and marsh and farm track’, is described with scrupulous anger, and leaves you with an uncomfortable feeling that it might have happened far more recently. And because it’s Davidson telling the story, you think of comparable events in Portuguese Africa, as the ...”

“... For 27 years Michael Wharton has written the ‘Peter Simple’ column in the Daily Telegraph. He was only 43 when he secured this good, steady job and now he has published an autobiographical account of his 43 apprentice years – dissident, drifting, bohemian years, marked by a lack of will-power, what the Greeks called aboulia ...”