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“... Piers PaulRead’s Free Frenchman is Bertrand de Roujay, whose most significant act is to repudiate Pétain and his expedient administration at Vichy, and take himself to London, clandestinely, where he throws in his lot with the more honourable and recalcitrant de Gaulle ...”

“... that the removal of faith in its nuclear programme played a major part in its eventual downfall. Piers PaulRead picks out, then weaves, these two themes with skill and sometimes – notably in his description of the explosion itself – with the vigour of a superior thriller writer. He seems to tire towards the ...”

“... and a well-fed and well-upholstered lack of confidence has been absorbed into their life-style. Piers PaulRead’s characters easily see through themselves. When Clare, the deceived wife now herself considering adultery, writes to a priest about her problem, the telling thing is not this revelation of residual ...”

“... and through persistence in the face of recurring failure, Father emerges as a kind of idealist. In Paul Theroux’s recent novel The Mosquito Coast there was a marvellously vital but similarly quixotic Father, an inventor-businessman making ice in the jungle. It seems that fiction is at present engaged in a cautious rehabilitation of the entrepreneur: easily ...”

“... High Street put up by his grandfather Julius. Pa was a music teacher, worshipper of Ruskin, read the Bible to the family. Ma took the children to the village Methodist chapel, something Stanley in the end found unsatisfying. ‘I have listened to a thousand sermons, and would like something to counterbalance this. I would like to ...”

“... Edwards and Jim Hussey come across socially as chaps to go into the jungle with, although novelist Piers PaulRead might demur: despite being warned by Biggs that he was being wound up, he more or less accepted the robbers’ concocted revelation that the robbery was financed by Otto Skorzeny the scar-faced Nazi ...”

“... best room in an overbooked hotel. In Poland for the papal visit in 1991, he’s so moved by John Paul II’s demeanour, conducting a six-hour open-air ceremony, that he seems to get close to re-conversion. ‘There was something about the singing, the colours and the beauty of the words which reminded me of strange, hard-won moments of pure contentment I had ...”

“... Life, Piers Morgan says about being sacked in 2004 as editor of the Mirror, is as serious as you want it to be. Lighten up, he repeatedly tells sad celebrities who complain about his front page exposés that result in their unemployment or divorce. Take it easy, he emails spin doctors and government ministers who fear for their majorities after he has trashed their policies or their love lives to two million readers of the Mirror ...”

“... of this single identity appeared to have been provided by the copyright line, which simply read: Richard Pennington. It seems unthinkable that a sometime publisher and printer would have allowed such a line to appear had he wished to float a forgery – he would have used the more discreet tactics of Madame Solario or Letters of an Indian Judge to an ...”

“... Charles Moore sinks to his knees straightaway and prays for a considerable period of time, and Piers PaulRead similarly. Some admiration for this, men who pray in public not uncourageous, though more often met with at Catholic rather than Anglican services. The service is conducted by Father Kit Cunningham who ...”

“... and self-reflexive narration; they acknowledge that a text has an unconscious, and that it can be read against the grain of its author’s apparent intentions. They see that Eminem’s lyrics might be a ‘text’ in the way that Middlemarch is a text. They are often keener than many scholars to open up the canon. But they diverge from most academic ...”

“... parliament building. ‘Buying a Trainspotting postcode in 1996 was a solid investment,’ I read the other day in the Scotsman. Prices in Leith, apparently, have risen more than 200 per cent. How did they keep this going through the collapse of RBS and HBOS, not to mention the tanking oil price, on the slide even before the independence referendum in ...”

“... dead by a hit-man in Spain in 1990 – in a rather different aura, more Gauloise than Craven A. Piers PaulRead’s The Train Robbers (1978) was another one: ‘the evil ... which I had sought in the train robbers can be found in any one of us and has little to do with the law of the land. There was both a good thief ...”

“... like bits of coloured glass or buttons made magical as images in the episcope (for which read, more or less, magic lantern). The names are familiar from Ovid, the people are different. Dig down a further layer, and you find a comparison between the order and symmetry of Rome and the barbaric freedom and strangeness of Tomi. Many, we are told, have ...”

“... She looked away and crumpled up the paper and put it on the fire. I was ten years old when John Paul II came to power. My granny instantly adored him, loving his feudal side without reservation and simply ignoring the freedom-upholding aspect. The only thing she was truly agnostic about was politics: she never mentioned that, and her only concern when it ...”