“... of the hemisphere. In the first novel it was the military; in the second, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord, it was narcoterrorism. In The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman the threat comes from the Catholic Church – more specifically, a bloody Crusade launched by the mad cardinal of the title. As before, the town is saved from destruction by the heroic ...”

“... it might have survived. Though it smacked of Maytime in Mayfair, it was a lot more than just a home-grown New Yorker and there was no real competition from Punch, which it far outstripped in its writing. As with the New Yorker before it got fat, Night and Day’s strength was in its departments. The personnel sounds like a dream roster, an all-time ...”

“... consists in missing the main point. (The contrast between Mr Rhodes James’s tender handling of Lord Randolph Churchill and the brusque treatment that statesman suffered at the hands of Roy Foster comes irresistibly to mind.) Albert liked Peel not only for his high seriousness, sense of public duty and moral commitment to the welfare of the mass of the ...”

“... judged Bishop Aylmer by, the letter he wrote to the future Earl of Leicester in 1559: ‘Good my Lord, if the deanery of Winchester be not already swallowed up, let me among the rest of the small fishes have a snatch at the bait. If it be gone, I beseech your good lordship cast a hook for the deanery of Durham.’ What mattered was not how bishops obtained ...”

“... Browne was a Laudian of the speculative, eirenic strain, akin in spirit to the intellectuals of Lord Falkland’s Great Tew Circle. The eirenic tendency – ‘I never could divide my selfe from any man upon the difference of an opinion,’ Browne writes – might look apolitical, but when push came to shove in 1642 such persons inclined to the king. During ...”

“... Blair could be pretty confident that his luck would hold. He knew, as we all know now, that Lord Hutton’s wheel was tilted heavily the government’s way. It was Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke of the BBC, foolishly trying to play Blair at his own game, who bet the farm, and lost. This risk-averse, high-stakes strategy is one of the things that set Blair ...”

“... around has always been precarious. In June 1652 Katherine Singard told of walking eight miles home to Great Budworth, Cheshire, carrying a sack of meal on her head. She stopped off in an alehouse to ‘beg some small drink’. The Experience of Work is valuable precisely because it offers a view of the early modern economy that isn’t defined by ...”

“... Blunt’s phrase, with whom, it seems, members of the British upper crust felt peculiarly at home. In her detailed account of four Victorian orientalist writers – Burton, Palgrave, Blunt and Doughty – she follows the emergence of this literary archetype and its Anglo-Saxon complement: the wandering Englishman uniquely qualified to ...”

“... batch of letters she had saved from the flames to her grand-niece, Lady Knatchbull, whose son, Lord Brabourne, had them published – like precious relics – in 1884. A number of other letters have surfaced since then; the great Austen scholar, R.W. Chapman, issued the first modern edition of the correspondence in 1932. Still, only 161 Austen letters are ...”

“... of Seeing Things (1991) came out of bruising rounds of academic labour and the hurly-burly of home life. Even the cottage in Glanmore became a problem as Heaney’s family grew and grew up. To one of his touchiest correspondents, the poet John Montague, he confessed in 1976: ‘I’m in a furious mess over the housing question. This place is a hellhole ...”

“... Of the life of this world But the things that endure, Good Deeds, are best In the sight of the Lord. The montage is touching and grotesque: the simple pieties of the Koran in jarring contrast with the crude mock-up of the dead couple in their wedding finery. Who could have dreamed up such a folly? The Di Castro Travel Agency, according to an engraved ...”

“... probably reinforced the sense that such songs had a worthy place in musical evenings at home. From about this time the sheet music is often advertised in the form of a part-song for soprano, contralto, tenor and bass, and it seems clear from the very large number of advertisements for the music thus arranged that the song was frequently performed ...”

“... and small beads, so that if an end-result is a very small bead – the governor in a Swiss rest-home – it is grotesquely out of proportion with the horrors that had led up to it. Much of this appearance of logic is due to the device of the supposedly objective narrator used here by Dostoevsky. In Crime and Punishment, the reader was mostly inside ...”

“... the first Modernists had, was less eclectic in his literary tastes and sources, and much more at home in a domestic English landscape and history. He did, however, have a strong intuition of the unreliability of the shelter which all of this offered, and while he naturally cherished it, he had a strong urge to divest himself of it.He was hungering for a ...”

“... at all in this world, is to see that boy.’ The body keeps waiting, she explains, for him to come home, listens for his sounds, awaits his imprint on the air in Chelsea colours. Hopeless desire, then, and what it would look like for it not to be hopeless. Byatt would not go so far in fiction as to have the ghost appear to the mother, who is ...”