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“... of the church, the rise of intolerance, the spirit of the Crusades – blame it on Constantine. David Potter punctures this inflated image. This doesn’t mean he cuts Constantine down to size: far from it. Potter has done something far more difficult. He has examined, with gusto and an unrivalled mastery of ...”

“... Theodora and attendants, from a sixth-century mosaic in the Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna David Potter’s contribution to the series is a life of the sixth-century Byzantine empress Theodora, the wife of Justinian, who ruled the eastern Roman provinces from Constantinople for almost forty years. Justinian had been a soldier from Illyrian peasant ...”

“... The death of Dennis Potter may have been authored by God, but it was adapted for television by Potter himself. It began after a brief report in the Guardian suggested that Potter’s terminal cancer related to his lifelong addiction to nicotine ...”

“... almost all of Spain. Yet guerrilla bands under chieftains with colourful nicknames like ‘The Potter’, ‘The Priest’ and ‘The Stick in the Mud’ (El Empecinado) made large stretches of the countryside ungovernable, forcing the French to travel in armed convoys and to employ increasingly brutal methods of counterinsurgency. At one point, a French ...”

“... fiction, one of the questions I’ve been most often asked is ‘Are they any good, the Potter books?’ – a question which, like the Latin prefix num, anticipates the answer ‘no’. A phoenix from a 13th-century bestiary A lot of their power comes from appealing to the fairy-tale desire of every child to believe that they are secretly ...”

“... at a discount of 50 per cent. Coming under fire at a meeting of the Independent Publishers Guild, David Kneale, the managing director of Waterstone’s, reminded delegates that ‘we have shareholders and have to make a profit.’ He changed tack later, insisting that his first responsibility was to his staff (that wouldn’t include Robert Topping, of ...”

“... undertakers hover in their closing pages), then at least from the crystal set to iPlayer. David Hendy’s book has the strengths of an insider’s account, packed with detail and anecdotes, shrewd in its assessment of personalities, light on socioeconomic change. Simon Potter’s is more academic and ...”

“... A drunken American historian once lurched over to David Caute at a party and told him: ‘Having read your last novel, or part of it, I’d advise you to give up writing fiction – if you weren’t such a lousy historian.’ Caute, a connoisseur of masochism, tells the story against himself (in Contemporary Novelists, 1976 ...”

“... It’s hard to imagine anyone settling down to write the further adventures of that Harry Potter of the 1830s, Tom Brown; even harder to imagine anyone settling down to read them. (Thomas Hughes did in fact write a sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford, but it’s never done as well as Tom Brown’s Schooldays: Amazon.co.uk hasn’t even heard of it ...”

“... of the universally adored J.K. Rowling OBE. Is this not taking the antique Englishness of Harry Potter just a little too far? But then I remember that the ‘feasts’ served up at Hogwarts boarding school are of ‘roast beef, roast chicken . . . lamb chops . . . Yorkshire puddings . . . peppermint humbugs’ and the like. All of which is, as the ...”

“... Like Hoyle and Stephen Potter, Georges Perec was a devotee of indoor games. La Vie Mode d’Emploi (1978), a title combining lifemanship, gamesmanship and one-upmanship, was the monumental creation of an author whose other productions included a treatise on Go (the Japanese board-game) and a weekly crossword for the magazine Le Point ...”

“... has been keen to register all students to vote ... twice (‘a civil rights issue’, says Ruth Potter, the National Secretary for Labour Students). Portsmouth South has a (Tory) majority of only 242; Loughborough, Cambridge, Oxford West, Exeter and others will have close calls. Major called the last election on 9 April – as luck and calculation had it, a ...”

“... a prizewinner in the 1937 Paris International Exhibition. In one of the catalogue essays the potter Edmund de Waal sets her in the Viennese context. Her career began there at a moment of flux, somewhere towards the end of the Wiener Werkstätte and the beginning of Modernism. It was this crux, de Waal suggests, that made it possible for Rie to define ...”

“... audio-visual life, but the relatively recent personifications by Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov and David Suchet dominate most memories. None of these figures much resembles the ‘short, stout, elderly man, his hair cut en brosse’ that Agatha Christie describes. Well, they often manage the stout bit, but for the rest they are tallish, more like ...”

“... the efforts of kindly Tommies in winning hearts and minds. Recent studies – for instance, David French’s excellent The British Way in Counter-Insurgency 1945-67 – show that in Malaya, Cyprus, Aden and Kenya British soldiers in fact displayed frequent brutality, often condoned by their officers. In all of Britain’s counterinsurgency ...”