“... difficult relationship, and any vestiges of paradise faded quickly. Photographed nude by her young husband in ‘“artistic” poses’, Peter’s mother, Nan, was a midwife’s daughter who later told Peter that her father had raped her mother ‘at knifepoint on their wedding night because she was menstruating and reluctant to make love’. Peter was ...”

“... longueurs. His detective is a marginal presence, cohabiting in Pooterish domesticity with a nice young man. Ackroyd doesn’t burden his narrative with the tedium of a convincing topography, or nostalgia for the lost decencies. He’s busy, with this Post-Modern Sweeney Todd, reviving the shilling shocker – which, thanks to the confusion of the current ...”

“... looks were stunning – it is the only appropriate adjective’; W.B. Yeats: ‘the handsomest young man in England’; H.W. Nevinson: ‘the whole effect was almost ludicrously beautiful’). The principal driver of myth-creation was the sonnets, whose notion of willing sacrifice in a noble cause had unerringly caught the public mood in this early ...”

“... but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned … as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation. This extraordinary generosity ...”

“... squares, cubes. He has understood many of their properties; his powers seem to match those of the young Gauss. He throws off a version of Russell’s paradox in a teasing aside to his father. He gives Roz a drawing to take away, a puzzling pattern of numerals. She works out that it represents factorials and constitutes a proof that the nth difference of xn is ...”

“... actually an extremely complex period, in which she tried to re-establish her influence over the young James VI, amid interminable negotiations over a compromise that would bring her captivity to an end. Mary’s demise was the result of yet another plot, the Babington Plot of 1586. This was a plan to murder Elizabeth and free Mary, to which Mary famously ...”

“... close relations with North Korea, welcoming delegates from the DPRK to its congresses and sending young members to Pyongyang to see what a socialist society looked like. They were completely unprepared for the collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, which came just after the high point of the Workers’ Party’s political success, when its ...”

“... distils the message of the assault on the NGOs: they are accomplices to murder, and traitors. A young, bearded Arab man facing the viewer raises his arm to attack, then the image freezes and a female announcer tells us: Before the next terrorist stabs you, he already knows that Yishai Menuhin, a planted agent belonging to Holland, will make sure to protect ...”

“... One thing the Tate retrospective brought home to me was the depth of Nash’s attachment as a young man to Blake, and to the Rossetti strain of Pre-Raphaelitism; and this helped me understand why so much from the past of the landscape tradition that might have helped him – been adaptable to 20th-century purposes – remained essentially unavailable to ...”

“... he might be tempted to make such a barely thinkable journey, it was now. He was 31, famous for the David and the Pietà, but his dealings with the pope were deadlocked. If Europe’s ultimate patron was being difficult, perhaps a more obliging one could be found elsewhere. In his author’s note, Enard cannily stops short of asserting the factuality of the ...”

“... literary company. Between the lines, you glimpse a lovable character bursting with curiosity: a David Attenborough of the cultural world, taking pleasure in every manifestation of symbolic activity from the humblest to the most magnificent. (He even embraced some snarky barbs directed at him by Heidegger and his students.) This congenial impression is ...”

“... and soundscape appears in several of her compatriots’ work, in the poetry of Grace Nichols and David Dabydeen, and, especially, in the fiction of Wilson Harris. (I once invited Harris, a long-time resident of Chelmsford, to talk about what it was like to live in Essex: he wrote back to say that he had no idea – his mind was always in Guyana.)Gilroy’s ...”

“... as their children did not, the kind of country they were living in. Unlike Roberto Bolaño, a young adult at the time of the coup, or José Donoso, then at the height of his fame, these writers didn’t experience military rule as a rupture with the past but as the unremarkable norm. This has resulted in a very specific strain of metafiction, concerned ...”

“... much a rich man’s plaything. In 1954, however, it had the good fortune to be bought by a wealthy young barrister who, initially at least, brought to it the same benevolent rule as editor-proprietor that David Astor exercised on the Observer. It was at this stage that Inglis was lucky enough to join it – having leapt on ...”

“... more rigorous and living languages’. In his last chapter, a fascinating discussion of the art of David Walliker, he makes it plain that meaningful law is impossible because under contemporary conditions of ‘ultra-modernity’ the authority required by such a law cannot exist. Instead we have only ‘the social forms of human absence’ arranged within ...”