“... his father wrote advising him to leave the girls in Glasgow rather than bring them to the parental home, but he didn’t receive the letter. His mother refused to call the children by their names and referred to them as the ‘little moonlight shades’. Difference in skin colour could provoke violence, sometimes affection, rarely indifference; often it ...”

“... police cars speeding in the opposite direction towards the bank, he missed his evening flight home to Denver. He caught one the next day and went to stay at his girlfriend’s house. The day after that, his father, Norm, came to pick him up and a few minutes later their car was surrounded by an FBI Swat team. Alex was placed under arrest, with a gun to ...”

“... less than three feet tall) alongside such frauds as the ‘Feejee Mermaid’. Lincoln felt at home with both elite and popular culture. Reynolds believes that his success as a politician stemmed from his engagement with the diverse cultural phenomena around him. For Reynolds, Lincoln really was ‘Abe’, the everyman depicted in his campaign ...”

“... and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to see realised. But, my lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.’ What has more recently become known is that Fischer was opposed to the inclusion of the final sentence, fearing that the judge would take it as a challenge. In the event Mandela’s instinct ...”

“... all. The confessions were backed by the most overwhelming scientific evidence. Dr Frank Skuse, a Home Office forensic scientist, had found traces of nitroglycerine on the young woman’s hands as soon as she’d been arrested. He’d also found nitroglycerine, he said, on her duffle bag, which had been rescued from one of the freight wagons she’d lived ...”

“... people, who met in pubs, drank draught cider and sometimes read each other their works. It is Lord of the Rings country and yet, interestingly, social nuances appear even in this consciously Christian and nostalgic setting. Tolkien the Catholic could not stand Lewis’s fundamentalist allegory, as exemplified in tales like The Lion, the Witch and the ...”

“... Germans, and did not want them to control the Persian supply. In 1914, Churchill, who was First Lord, persuaded the Commons – alluding to ‘monopolies’, ‘trusts’, ‘foreigners’ and ‘cosmopolitans’– that the British Government should take a 51 per cent interest in the company. The Bill received its assent on 10 August. The still small ...”

“... that some trainee heritage pirate had tried to chisel free of its moorings. Then got the hell out. Home. Past the squatted shell of the Black Bull with its ‘No Evictions’ banner, through the Blank Generation extras waiting for nothing in the boarded-up shopping precinct, ducking into Muggers’ Alley alongside the decommissioned post office. To my ...”

“... in The Great Gatsby, of needing to fulfil a personal myth and become the man he had dreamed of. Lord Jim and Gatsby are doomed by the plot they invent for themselves: Crane’s own tale was ironically haunted by just the kind of démarche or incongruous detail he was good at describing. The debonair poker-playing war reporter was in fact a mother’s ...”

“... and in England Doris Lessing also seems to have gone galactic, or at least inter-planetary. The Home Office, for its part, still promises survival for the homely. In view of all this, one is tempted to proscribe any further dealings with one’s apocalyptic self, for fear of giving comfort to the enemy. But it won’t do: that self is in all of us, for good ...”

“... political lineage of Europe, that of ‘Dr Johnson, Pitt the Younger, Burke, Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury’. Some other recent world-histories have taken a stand against Euro-centrism, notably William McNeill’s A World History (1971) and J.M. Roberts’s The Hutchinson History of the World (1976). In this regard, Mr Thomas is a self-conscious ...”

“... editor appears and fortunately Professor Kimball does not qualify. He is not absolutely at home in British affairs and has managed to introduce a few minor errors on this front. He refers to the ‘Lloyd George Liberal Government of World War One’, refuses to admit Sir Stafford Cripps to the War Cabinet in 1942, and thinks that Balaam was ‘a name ...”

“... to milk Shapiro dry. After a particularly ugly late-night scene with Liza and Micki, Shapiro runs home to Celia – whom he finds, like a character in some old farce, at the back door hastily bidding goodbye to her own illicit lover. Shapiro packs his bags and liquidates his assets; he makes his way to Israel, where he divorces Celia, marries a good ...”

“... poetry which Protestantism inhibited. But he also mocks Christian sado-masochism: the crucified Lord wears a ‘wreath of rakish thorn’. Religion emerges from the sequence as a supreme fiction rather than as something unequivocally affirmed. The Arnoldian claim that literature may take the place of religion becomes anything but consoling if the Christian ...”

“... Nintendos and Kindles are assembled – as ‘Mordor’. Why the evil kingdom in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings? ‘At its peak,’ Lindsay writes, ‘some 320,000 workers toiled on its assembly lines and slept in its dormitories.’ A rash of suicides among its workers is part of the reason for Foxconn’s relocation to the still poorer and more ...”