“... space for any genre, any costume and any voice. You can make it a detective thriller, like John Lawton’s Riptide, set in London in 1941, featuring Sergeant Troy of the Yard. You can make it modern picaresque, a frenetic burst of lyrical futurist imagery, like Rodney Hall’s The Day We Had Hitler Home, which is haunted by the presiding monster-to-be ...”

“... London house, 46 Lower Belgrave Street, the countess was violently assaulted and her husband, John Bingham, seventh earl of Lucan, disappeared, offer all things to all tastes. The story has the violent glamour of crime fiction with the additional thrill of reality, and the facts are just enough to make a narrative while leaving hugely tantalising areas of ...”

“... one suspects, very much worse than death in the mind of the ageing Eurosceptic Tory. We know who John Gielgud was – the greatest English speaker of his generation, the lyre of English verse – but his letters tell a story of who he was underneath all that, or perhaps because of being all that. At 23, we find him writing to his mother from Newcastle about ...”

“... the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Donald Trump’s (then) chief of staff, John Kelly, went on Fox News and delivered a history lesson. ‘The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,’ he said. ‘Men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.’ Kelly’s ...”

“... store. On midsummer’s night in 1955 a tall, broad-shouldered farmer 17 years her senior, John Warren, took her to the stock car racing, and a year later, when Wendy was 21, they got married. John Warren rented 175 acres from the local squire in Dunton Bassett, a village in the south-west of the county. He’d been ...”

“... who is behind all the bribes’ – which they alleged to be worth many millions of dollars. John Cripton, a Canadian impresario who had booked the Maryinsky/Kirov on foreign tours for ten years, said that Vinogradov used to demand additional payments on every contract. Vinogradov denies everything, and – now out on bail – has continued to work at ...”

“... has such devotion been shown by one brother to the memory of another,’ wrote Maisie Ward, Chesterton’s first biographer; ‘never has the greater man exalted the lesser to such a pedestal.’Cecil was a stinker by all accounts, including the admiring ones. Ada begins The Chestertons with the story of her first meeting with the brothers at a ...”

“... us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and Peter Keating, surveyors and encyclopedists of the form who in their respective fields have laboured with energetic exhaustiveness and not broken down. Each of these books feels as if it takes in an infinity of novels, and each deserves the ...”

“... imagination Carter may perform, she always comes to rest in the right ideological position,’ John Bayley wrote in a notoriously slighting 1992 review: the ballet idea works well, but otherwise he’s a bit tin-eared. A ‘moral pornographer’, Carter called herself sometimes; she could also have called herself an ideological choreographer. It’s not ...”

“... well aware of Wharton’s elegy, but they are not interested in the personage it describes. As the ward of Rochester’s mother, Wharton was brought up in the same house as the poet and, though she was twelve years younger, knew Rochester rather better than we or any other of the commentators on his life may be said to have done. In the months that followed ...”

“... who light dirty and are sanctimonious about it: Lydia Lawrence and Meyers’s other bête noire, John Middleton Murry. Murry perhaps deserves what he gets (though one still wonders why Lawrence stuck to him for so long); but Lydia gets a biographical third degree. Her father is said to have ‘described himself as an engineer’ while actually being ‘a ...”

“... or even fifteen-minute pick-ups, none likely to have any emotional content. As he had told John Lehmann, “I freely admit to having no romantic notions about trade.”’ ‘Their residence in Paris in spring 1965 made clear to both Howard and Gore how much more they preferred Rome. Nightlife and cruising were easier, more casual there, and there were ...”

“... more serious and scientific than love notes.) The second example is a murder mystery about John Gower by Bruce Holsinger, which takes a different tack.2 Chaucer is glimpsed; he is a calculating and casual character, shallowly obsessed with his literary reputation and erotic conquests. The daring comes partly from making Gower – whose literary image ...”

“... and scattered on the ground; dried rosemary, burned in a chafing dish, was also thought to help ward off the pestilence). William Shakespeare survived and may even have developed immunity to plague, for he subsequently lived through a virulent outbreak in London in 1592-93 that swept away 10,500 people, and another in 1603 that killed 25,000. A string of ...”

“... were filled in America. The largest psychiatric institutions downsized or were shuttered. John F. Kennedy announced that the ‘reliance on the cold mercy of custodial isolation’ could now be ‘supplanted by the open warmth of community concern and capability’. It didn’t work out like that.Mimi thought that as long as her boys took their ...”