“... the batrachoidal Farage likewise. ‘So where’s your sense of humour? It’s only a joke.’7 May. On the TV news footage of Stuart Hall arriving for the first day of his trial at Preston Crown Court; he is seemingly handcuffed with his hands held in front of him, but thus shackled has to negotiate the quite steep steps from the police van. At 84, he ...”

“... or at least its dedicated mourner. He has written a polemic against John Major’s Government and David Owen, the EU mediator in the remains of Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995, for their connivance in the ferocious dismantling of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is keen on Major’s New Labour successors, and confident that Tony Blair’s support for the Milosevic ...”

“... genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by ...”

“... and depressions which were exacerbated by unsatisfactory love affairs, saddened them. There may even be a little guilt in it. Every time and place has its characteristic luxuries. In Minton’s Soho they were champagne and taxis. Minton was always better off than most of his friends, and sometimes very much richer (the money came from department ...”

“... people’; Lord Curzon’s political career was ‘an ultimate failure’. These quotations from David Cannadine’s collection of essays, Aspects of Aristocracy, show that, for all his gifts, he would not be a front-runner for the editorship of Country Life. Few historians bring more energy and relish to chronicling the shortcomings of titled or famous ...”

“... fix the problem before its cost in blood and treasure agitated public questions. As the journalist David Halberstam emphasised in 1972 in The Best and the Brightest, the experts were less than wise. More important, the making of far-reaching overseas commitments without a Congressional and public consensus was a formula for political failure at home and for ...”

“... gossip thinly disguised as fiction, prompted one suicide and general outrage. Unbelievable as it may seem, Capote failed to foresee that ‘La Côte Basque’ – named after a Manhattan restaurant – would rouse such enmity. Answered Prayers was to be his most ambitious work, an exposé of the very rich. Absurdly, he insisted on comparing his work in ...”

“... win the Vogel Award, the most prominent prize for first novels in Australia; it was described by David Marr, Patrick White’s biographer, as ‘astonishingly talented’, and by Jill Kitson of the ABC as ‘a searingly truthful account of terrible wartime deeds that is also an imaginative work of extraordinary redemptive power’. Assuming, as we all ...”

“... guests who threw corn-ears at the bridal pair (no confetti, please), and all who made ‘rather a May game of marriage, than a holy institution of God’. William Gouge, a London minister, was a little more relaxed: in 1622 he allowed ‘all those lawful customs that are used for the setting forth of the outward solemnity thereof, as meeting of ...”

“... Salman Rushdie’s residence also rates a ‘comfortable’, but he’s in Tufnell Park. David Storey’s pad, on the other hand, is fashionably situated but Honest John Haffenden would be lying if he didn’t tell you it was merely ‘roomy’. Top marks go to Pritchett and to Malcolm Bradbury, who wins a hard-to-come-by ‘elegant’ for his ...”

“... been seized by other means. But Ratushinskaya knows quite well that nothing can be done, and that may be why the authorities particularly fear her sort. With a counterrevolutionary, or a new sort of revolutionary, you know where you are, but the KGB could only find her guilty of ‘an unenthusiastic way of thinking’. A splendid phrase that tells much, but ...”

“... nodding to DeLillo’s coolly precise technical jargon, Pynchon’s loose historical riffs and David Foster Wallace’s involuted, self-undermining thought-processes, Moody weaves together a great number of voices into agile and extremely long sentences. He ventriloquises the clinical impersonality of a technician (‘urinary pressure increasing ...”

“... the summer of 2010, that is, when it was revealed that Low’s family was distantly related to David Cameron’s. Shortly after the prime minister returned from his first official visit to India, the Sunday Times broke the story that Low’s eldest son, Malcolm, had taken part in the brutal suppression of the rebels in 1857, leaving a graphic account in ...”

“... David Freedberg’s new book is illustrated with wonderful, detailed drawings and engravings of plants, fungi, fossils, birds, insects and animals – nearly all made in the 17th century. Freedberg is an art historian; the starting point of his book is a dream he had sometime before 1986 in which Anthony Blunt appeared holding a drawing of an orange ...”

“... their surroundings, and tried to come to terms with modernity? ‘This is a political history,’ David Vital’s first sentence states baldly. What interests him most is the legal relationship between Jews and the states they lived in, their evolving civic status, the nature and growth of hostility to them (though not its causes), and the emergence of ...”