“... lives. She speaks of the London press as ‘evil and morally corrupt’. From Whitbread winner to John Knox in four easy weeks. Even the friendlier Scottish papers were apt to harp on rags-to-riches, overnight success. Commentators should take this truth to heart: no novelist ever has an overnight success. Atkinson has been writing for fifteen years, and it ...”

“... be compatible with nominal British sovereignty or even continued Protestant supremacy in the North? It isn’t clear that British politicians appreciated these nuances, though some officials, including Michael Oatley, the MI6 man on the ground, certainly did. The principal IRA objective was an invitingly lowish hurdle, and should have been seen as ...”

“... 1954) but on its ability to tell complex stories – its contributors included William Faulkner, John Updike, Jack Kerouac and Don DeLillo. In Blood in the Garden, Herring is firmly in narrative mode, and he wants to remind us what a good narrative sport basketball is.This is true for several reasons, some more interesting than others. First, the obvious ...”

“... intermittently. There were two main flashpoints: the perpetually war-torn Italian peninsula, and North-West Europe. Over the years, the struggle between England, France and the Habsburg Low Countries had led to a series of shifting alliances, and both Habsburg and French agents were active in England, seeking to pull sympathies one way or the other. United ...”

“... turned up in 1974, and kept Christopher both amused and busy translating his poetry into English. John Silber, who later became a reactionary megalomaniac (first as president of Boston University and then as failed gubernatorial candidate), was at that point a brilliant and progressive dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, also brought in by Ransom. The ...”

“... West Bank city of Jericho. In the late 1970s, as their careers took off, both men left Israel for North America – Kahneman went to the University of British Columbia and Tversky to Stanford. Tversky was the first to become famous for the work they’d done together, and the tensions caused by this damaged their relationship, which until then had had a near ...”

“... tortured in Iraq but didn’t betray his comrades or his country. He’s also a former governor of North Carolina, the state he was born in and where he was brought up by his single mother. He married his law school sweetheart (called, bizarrely, Rachel Carson), and they had one child, a daughter. So he’s a curious – you could almost say implausible ...”

“... architecture. It was completed after his death (in 1852) by another architectural historian, John Henry Parker, who also drew on it for Our English Home: Its Early History and Progress (1860). Despite this encouraging start, the emergence in the later 19th and early 20th centuries of modern history as a university subject did nothing to advance the study ...”

“... douched, frozen, pilled, potioned, lotioned, salivated … by Act of Parliament?’ blustered John Gibbs, hydropath and teetotaller, in a pamphlet denouncing the act. The anti-vaccination movement was born. It was, initially, little more than a collection of outraged scribblers: the 1853 Act was easily evaded and Poor Law Unions, which had quite enough to ...”

“... saw British expeditions revert to throwing lives away in ill-provisioned attempts to find the North-West Passage, ultimately for mercantile but also for strategic reasons: to prevent such a passage falling beneath foreign control. The relevance of all this to Mars may be tangential, in a century’s time maybe not. An age might have to elapse before there ...”

“... The first pulse, about forty thousand years ago, took out Australia’s giants. A second pulse hit North America and South America some 25,000 years later. Madagascar’s giant lemurs, pygmy hippos and elephant birds survived all the way into the Middle Ages. New Zealand’s moas made it as far as the Renaissance. It’s hard to see how such a sequence could ...”

“... from the inside (Healy lives in County Sligo, which is within hailing distance of the North) but a good deal more cold-eyed than anything one would expect to find in the work of Sebastian Barry. Like Jack Ferris, the drunken protagonist of A Goat’s Song, Ireland binged for a few euphoric years, then woke up with an almighty hangover. The ...”

“... the prevailing condition of interdependence across the modern world. Neil MacCormick’s father, John, was the principal begetter of the SNP, from which he became estranged during the Second World War. At the queen’s accession MacCormick senior, still a leading nationalist but operating outside the ranks of the SNP, instigated the legal proceedings ...”

“... airplane blind-dating the south tower, People are screaming with horror. The airplane meeting the north tower Erupts with ketchup. Only Seidel could make a word like ‘ketchup’ offensive – but it’s directed against the terrorists as well as those who would use their crime to venerate their own holy wars, and also against the poet’s own ...”

“... in this drama: the Imagists – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington, T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell – as well as scores more who had a stake in the continuing vitality of literature, including Yeats, Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The writers, clustered in clubs or ‘gangs’, wanted to ...”