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“... is that she talked him out of abandoning it. The parallel seems perfect. The book’s hero, Nick Charles, has taken early retirement from sleuthing to pursue his interest in alcohol. (Fans recommend playing a game as you read: to try to match him drink for drink. This would be dangerous.) Nick’s wife, Nora, who never knew him in his detecting ...”

“... of groups stretching from Ian Paisley’s branch of the Unionists through to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness and whoever they officially or unofficially represent. Typically, this ‘peaceful solution’ seems to involve shuffling Northern Ireland into a closer relationship with the Irish Republic and trying to get the spectrum of political groups to ...”

“... slavery’ while consuming the products of literal slavery. Among those at the table are Charles Dickens, prattishly joking and preaching for free trade while failing to see into the experiences of those around him, an oafish Thackeray, and Dickens’s biographer John Forster, who SHOUTS IN CAPITALS, as well as George Cruikshank the angry ...”

“... new Speaker. The advance was $4.6 million: not bad for an untried new writer. The row was not of Martin Amis proportions – this is not a very literary town – but there were some ugly whispers about conflict of interest. Mr Gingrich himself agreed to waive the advance in exchange for a share of royalties that will probably net him about the same. Nobody ...”

“... which charts a young woman’s mental deterioration: she asked to meet Jackson, Linda Wagner-Martin relates in her 1987 biography of Plath, when she was working at Mademoiselle in the summer of 1953. Wagner-Martin has elsewhere called the 1950s ‘the decade of Jackson’, although an interviewer recently put it to ...”

“... not want to take military action against the Scots; he had also been opposed to the execution of Charles. Though Fairfax’s outlook and his Horatian retirement from public life are reflected subtly in the poems, Marvell came to admire Cromwell in the years from 1653 to Cromwell’s death in 1658 – he was the de facto laureate to the new state. He also ...”

“... styled ‘HRH’. Strange, then, that anti-Establishment figures like Churchill and Kingsley Martin and Beaverbrook, a sort of distillate of the Rex Mottram set, should have been ‘King’s Men’ of a kind in 1936 and have staked some part of their careers on defending this ugly little gargoyle. But perhaps not so strange, since in our own day there ...”

“... prone to the overstatement of youth but this is the real thing. The voice here is like that of Martin Amis, whose mark is all over this novel, not just in the muscular, shouldering prose style – the style of John Self – but in Ripley’s rich tangle of adolescent preoccupations, his Charles Highway-like obsession ...”

“... He has come into all the material collected by John Lehmann’s commissioned biographer, Martin Taylor, who died before he could write a word of it. He has seen photocopies of the extensive diaries, and he has interviewed the survivors and their descendants. Lehmann himself wrote three volumes of dignified autobiography about his work, his ...”

“... of a retired Prussian officer, Friedrich Kasiski, and, independently, to the English inventor Charles Babbage. The cipher’s weak point, it turned out, was not its encoding strategy, but the length of the key (usually a single word or phrase) which has to be repeated many times until it covers the message if it’s to designate an alphabet for each ...”

“... Robespierre, Marie Antoinette, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Richelieu, Wolsey, Cranmer, Cromwell, Charles I and James II was now to be found lamenting ‘this horrible book on Louis XIV’, which he had never wanted to write, and mislaying the uncompleted manuscript of his life of Elizabeth Tudor. Throughout, his battle-cry was, as this book reminds us, that ...”

“... as well as satirise the paranoia which was exacerbated by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968 and seemed to find its justification in the Watergate revelations. Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate – an eerie anticipation published in 1959 and then turned into a Hollywood film which appeared during the Cuban ...”

“... forging an alliance with Sigismund in 1416 Henry played a central role in the election of Pope Martin V the following year. Vale also brings to light fascinating evidence of a diplomatic mission to central and eastern Europe in May 1421. Confident of victory in France now that his hereditary right to the throne had been recognised by the French king in the ...”

“... mostly those on monastic estates, voiced religious grievances. Only three years had passed since Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, castigated Martin Luther at Worms for his 95 theses and other foundational texts of the Reformation. Although Luther shrank back to a more conservative position, his doctrine of the priesthood ...”

“... Last autumn, at the award ceremony of the 1994 Turner Prize, Charles Saatchi took the podium at the Tate Gallery. It was a very rare public appearance by Britain’s leading private collector of contemporary art. His words were awaited with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate ...”