“... him. The first significant one, published in 1926, was the account by the Austrian psychiatrist Martin Pappenheim of his conversations with Princip in his prison cell. But only one work is essential: fifty years after it first appeared, Vladimir Dedijer’s The Road to Sarajevo is still unsurpassed. Dedijer isn’t concerned with the assassin’s ...”

“... into the swamp. Which’s all the thanks he gets. Still, when Lestat’s buoyed up again on the King tide, regurgitated   so to speak, an infuriated Witi burns down the house.     Downs another bourbon; and on the proceeds   from Sunday’s fund-raising carwash, flees with Helena to Europe where they melt into the crowd. She’s got red curly ...”

“... I hope scholarly ghost. The project was to write a history of the sculpture department at St Martin’s School of Art. Anthony Caro invited me to do it, and the idea was that the book would be a tribute to Frank Martin, the head of the department, and would be published in the year of his retirement. Caro and ...”

“... on to Malta and then to England, where she arrived in June 1827 and was taken to Windsor. The king had her fed on a supposedly nourishing diet of milk, ordered a warm and commodious stable to be constructed for her comfort, and commissioned portraits of her from three painters. But she didn’t thrive. Her head began to droop and physicians were ...”

“... is vividly symbolised in Egypt by the physical link between the library and the (dead) body of the king. So, for example, long before the foundation of the Hellenistic library of Alexandria the tomb of the pharaoh Rameses II had contained a renowned ‘sacred library’; and just next to the Alexandrian Museum itself was the Soma (literally ‘the ...”

“... precedent that the House could make law without the participation of the House of Lords or of the king. He had established the right of electors to elect whomever they please and the principle that no constituency could be represented by anyone they had not elected. He had brought before the British public the injustices of the electoral system and the need ...”

“... woman, Cosima, wife of his young protégé Hans von Bülow, and he has found a loyal patron, the King of Bavaria. On the last page he hears of the death of his old enemy, the German-born Parisian composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. Wendelin Weissheimer, a minor German composer and Wagner groupie, provides the epitaph by ‘bursting out into harsh laughter at the ...”

“... prefacing his review of G.R. Potter’s Life of Huldrych Zwingli with a couplet: ‘Some talk of Martin Luther and some of Calvin (John)/But Zwingli’s hardly mentioned this side of Zollikon.’ Nevertheless, one can’t deny the truth of it. Potter’s admirable book piled up the evidence that would allow English-speakers to reassess Switzerland’s ...”

“... Hemingway shot himself. His death is the only regret of my magnificent career.’ The cartoonist Martin Rowson got the last laugh in the Independent on Sunday, with a riff on the ‘body of literature’: ‘And yet where are Publishers in this Corporeal Plan?/You’ll see them as a TAPEWORM if you do a CT scan.’ Alongside these lines was a caricature of ...”

“... artist of the early 21st century, a Frenchman with the curiously American-sounding name Jed Martin. Such a backward-gazing Künstlerroman invites comparison with the trajectory of the author himself. And Houellebecq also includes a character bearing his own name and more or less corresponding to his public image as the sad bad boy of French ...”

“... invited), and a jolly good party (to which he was) at the College of Heralds with Garter Principal King of Arms, where the forthcoming full-colour photofacsimile of Domesday Book was advertised by Publications Alecto. Meanwhile, in the Great Hall at Winchester, the Phillimore edition was exhibited, and the Alecto facsimile again advertised, in the very place ...”

“... school up the road – ever saw, and I appreciated it. Round a corner or two in Petty Cury was King Street, where there stood a rank of pubs. A rite of passage in those days was to inhale a pint of suds in each within the space of an hour – the ‘King Street run’ – without puking, or without puking until the ...”

“... to Le Médécin malgré lui to indict himself as a quack. Welsh then moves to an examination of Martin Chuzzlewit as both a rewriting of Tartuffe and Dickens’s buried admission of his own hypocrisy. As Welsh candidly admits, the primary evidence for doing this is slim. Some twenty-five years after the novel was written, Forster labelled Pecksniff ‘our ...”

“... when Mr Phillips remembers going to see a play with his son about another recently unemployed man, King Lear, his response is predictable (the kind of thing you find in Larkin’s letters), but (also like the man in Larkin’s letters) subtle in refusing the available subtleties, and distrustful of them. In retrospect he sees it as one of the longest four ...”

“... monarchy declined (despite his efforts, or even because of them), while France rose. The ‘planet king’, Philip IV, was eclipsed by the sun of Louis XIV. History, or the historian at any rate, has little patience with failure. The second reason for the neglect of Olivares is the loss of most of his papers, those notorious papers which he took everywhere ...”