“... This, as he recognises, is a form of self-praise. Throughout, Patrick is both the ‘King of the World’ that he wants to be – Glasgow belongs to him – and an abject sinner. The rage of the novel’s males would be enough to put the wind up Margaret Thatcher if it weren’t so often the rage of those who ...”

“... the modern world as being devoid of authority and over-supplied with electric power plants. The King of the land of Ho (the Confucian term for harmony) has lived to regret the ploughing-up of his truffle-forests and bogle-fens to make room for an enormous power-station. Another of Barthelme’s narrators looks on with unconcealed envy at two old ladies ...”

“... safer with a fifty-year-old President. Other stock characters are borrowed from fiction, notably King Solomon’s Mines, which D.M. Thomas read with interest when he was a small boy in Australia. Like other boys, he wondered what sort of quarterdeck language Commander Good used when he was swearing at Zulus and whether he responded erotically to the devotion ...”

“... But the story of his life is no more than the nutshell in which he is bounded: within, he is still king of infinite space. One needs to know the story, to be sure: but it is the infinite space that counts. In the end, if one is to read about Stendhal, as one must, for curiosity about the man is a natural result of the magnetic attraction that draws one back to ...”

“... rental bungalows, a footnote in the biographies of T.E. Lawrence, Beaverbrook and Mackenzie King, and the villain in lachrymose ‘decline of Britain’ books and television series. I think by the end of the Seventies only the Hannay books and one or two others were still in print. The charges against John Buchan were either false (as with ...”

“... breakthrough in 1979, a year of strikes, bombs, serial killers, high inflation and the election of Margaret Thatcher. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan felt like the beginning of the end of the world. As Savage says, ‘there was a sense – reinforced by the vacant, derelict inner cities – that the bomb had already dropped.’ We were nostalgic for the ...”

“... a phase of ‘improving’ the imperfect Shakespeare, as for example in Nahum Tate’s version of King Lear, which allowed Cordelia not only to survive but to marry Edgar – a much more ‘satisfying’ result. And the 19th century produced one of my favourite ‘prequels’, Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, which offered the ...”

“... detective sergeant covering Soho. He becomes mixed up in complicated skulduggery involving a porn king and the bent superintendent who fitted him up and got him dismissed from the force. After a number of adventures with men, women and a seven-year-old boy (the only person Duffy can’t screw is his straight girlfriend), and after nearly having his penis ...”

“... to dare (for once) to imagine sympathetically. Reis’s conservatism and nostalgia for the exiled king, Dom Sebastião, is translated in the novel into sensitivity, and an acute awareness of everything that touches him. In 1998, Saramago wrote this: ‘In one sense it could even be said that, letter by letter, word by word, page by page, book after book, I ...”

“... process for handling federal clemency applications and, in the words of the American lawyer Margaret Colgate, ‘enjoyed a final unencumbered opportunity to reward friends, bless strangers and settle old scores’. On his last day in office, 20 January 2001, Clinton signed pardon warrants for 141 individuals and commuted the sentences of another ...”

“... For some writers, the new language beats out a no man’s land of English without echoes of the King James Bible or connections to imperial dreams. It’s the imaginative transformation of the liquid capital of English as a world language in an epoch of dislocation. For others, cosmopolitanism has returned as a form of resistance to the dangers of populist ...”

“... of. I reckon.’ ‘They’ had nothing to fear. The crowds who thronged central London saluted King, Parliament, Churchill, even allies with cordial appreciation, and were so harmless that the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, were allowed to slip out around 11 p.m. to mix with the crowd around Buckingham ...”

“... was, uniquely, both legally and constitutionally subordinate: he could be Prince Consort, but not King Consort. But Albert’s zeal for work and power of mind, combined with Victoria’s frequent pregnancies, meant that he soon took effective charge of royal affairs. He often dealt with politicians directly, was always present when the Queen saw her ...”

“... chapter of the Quran to explain the ‘miraculous’ US defeat. In Al-Fil, an Abyssinian king rides an army of elephants through the desert to conquer Mecca but is defeated when God sends vast flights of swallows to rain pebbles on the elephants.Galvanised by the spectacle of the Delta Force failure, and with experience as a Green Beret, paratrooper ...”

“... birth there to a son, William. She and her husband had lost their first two children, Joan and Margaret, in infancy. The prospects for their newborn’s survival – and perhaps their own – must have seemed grim. Just a few doors down from their home on Henley Street, their neighbours the Greens would lose four of their children to the epidemic. Windows ...”