“... It would be quite possible to read about Edward Thomas and wonder how it was that so many people made such allowances for him. A man who had a house built for himself and then refused to live in it, he tormented his wife and children with his restlessness – he calculated he was never happy for more than a quarter of an hour in the day ...”

“... though it should hardly have come as a surprise. The local Conservatives found it ‘sad’; one more sanguine resident told a national newspaper that everyone needed to have a hobby. The Labour prospective parliamentary candidate, Paul Harvey, called for a by-election; he was ignored. By the time of his defection to the DUP, the Tories should have got used ...”

“... gives the other point of view of the encounter between British and American prisoners: ‘To the more reserved, stiff-upper-lip types it seemed that the Yanks – “full of enthusiasm and exuberance”, as a rather more sympathetic RAF officer put it – complained too much about the level of deprivation they encountered ...”

“... his features were pixellated – reducing, as it happens, the resolution of his mugshot to more or less the same level as that of his secret pictures of the cadets. The hysterics continued inside the paper: a double-page spread describing The Investigator’s day out was underpinned by a few stern words from Andy McNab (‘Gulf War hero and ex-SAS ...”

“... father in a similar way. He refers so often to the dying man’s genitals that at times it seems a more appropriate title for his memoir would have been ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father’s Penis?’ Morrison senior didn’t want friends to visit him in hospital; when he got home he boarded up the window in the front door. ‘To be stalled and stranded ...”

“... bibliophile. Between 1495 and his death in 1515, Aldus issued from his Venice press more first editions of classical texts than had ever been published before, and more than anyone has published since. With his punchcutter, Francesco Griffo, he designed an elegant new typeface for printing in Greek (a serious ...”

“... that was unreal and that we were just characters in a play,’ Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, noted. More than any past presidential transition, Kennedy’s death and funeral, along with Johnson’s ascension to office, became a made-for-TV drama. Beginning with the first reports that Kennedy had been shot and up until the funeral three days later, the ...”

“... pyrotechnic genealogical loops of the pagan gods, but it also illustrates the problem of genealogy more generally. Where to start and who to include? The Gospel of Luke takes the lineal patriarchal story back to Adam, which makes us all Sons of Man, if not of David in particular. Matthew starts with Abraham and arranges the ancestors in three neat ...”

“... programme would be welcomed by the editor, too, allowing him to lead a richer, fuller life and see more of his children . . . Good writers lean on editors; they would not think of publishing something that no editor had read. Bad writers talk about the inviolable rhythm of their prose. Hard for an editor to read that without smiling. Writers who think it ...”

“... proportion to the success of a first novel – though it might simply be that those cases are more prominent. (J.K. Rowling, suffering from the much rarer condition of Fifth Novel Anxiety Syndrome, seems to have got the message, and has applied for planning permission to add a little room to her large house in Edinburgh to help her rediscover the ...”

“... Thomas and Katia Mann had six children. It was clear from early on that Katia most loved the second child, Klaus, who was born in 1906, and that Thomas loved Erika, the eldest, born in 1905, and also Elisabeth, born in 1918. The other three – the barely tolerated ones – were Golo, born in 1909, Monika, born in 1910, and Michael, born in 1919 ...”

“... was silly and arbitrary that novelists had to be under 40 to be considered, and that it should be more important that they’re new than that they’re young. Jack agreed. Few I suspect would go as far as John Sutherland (64) – the irrepressible champion of Salman Rushdie (55), whose most recent novel, Fury, wasn’t otherwise very well received – who has ...”

“... in Burlington, Washington, who in the spring was banned from teaching the theory. Evolution is a more satisfying explanation of life than intelligent design/creationism – or anything else that’s been so far proposed – because it doesn’t require the existence of anything for which there is no evidence (which isn’t to say it shouldn’t be discarded ...”

“... revulsion – strong enough to force him off the throne – against his irresponsible hedonism.’ More truly remarkable, and nothing to do with hindsight, is that Worsthorne should think wanting to marry a divorcee an instance of irresponsible hedonism. Worsthorne is evasive, or at least ambiguous, about the extent to which membership of the aristocracy is ...”

“... lets us like people we wouldn’t in real life.) A difference between them is that TV presenters more often than not share names and, ostensibly, ‘personalities’ with their creators. The alleged confusion this can cause in impressionable viewers is one of the themes of Mark Lawson’s new novel, Going out Live, or Are They the Same at ...”