“... a ship called the Zembla). McGuire’s opening sentence is an ironic allusion to John’s gospel – ‘Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man’ – but it also recalls the beginning of the novel that The North Water most resembles, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood ...”

“... The mutable nature of our relationship with the past is the underlying theme of Sentimental Murder, John Brewer’s compelling and surprising pursuit, across two and a half centuries, of the events of a single evening in 1779. What happened in Covent Garden on 7 April was simple enough and largely undisputed at the time or later ...”

“... of life on the throne. Grigory Danilovich, the hopelessly mediocre ‘military governor’ who took charge of Nicky’s education when the boy turned ten, is said to have told the tsarevich that he would learn all he needed to know from the ‘mysterious forces’ released by the ‘sacrament of taking the oath on the day of the coronation’. After 12 ...”

“... being negotiated with France, reignited the wrath of the North Briton’s flamboyant co-editor John Wilkes and his backers in the City, prompting the publication of another withering issue, number 45. The new prime minister, George Grenville, and his secretary of state, Lord Halifax, decided it was time to put a stop to this constant assault on government ...”

“... feral figures became our familiar louche aristocrats and sapphic seductresses, most notably in John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (the other story written during that famous summer on Lake Geneva in 1816), Keats’s ‘Lamia’, Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Groom calls Dracula a ‘brilliant culmination’ and ...”

“... campaign finance and one of his last votes was cast to undermine unions.Justice Brett Kavanaugh took Kennedy’s seat after a particularly acrimonious confirmation session, in which the nominee faced credible allegations of sexual assault. The political centre of the court now shifted from Kennedy to the chief justice, ...”

“... on any film and store it. Storing would then become the main endeavour of a filmmaker.’When John Lennon was killed in 1980, Ono became the guardian of his work and set about retrieving items that had belonged to him. (Gillon Aitken wrote about bidding on behalf of Ono for Lennon’s tie in the LRB of 25 July 1991.) She saw at first-hand the growth of ...”

“... on its spindly undercarriage. It was quicker on the ground than other airliners, just as it took off and landed faster than them. In all its movements, Trubshaw and his colleagues and their French counterparts had learned to expect an element of hurtle, exhilarating to master. Events came at a Concorde pilot at a more adrenalised tempo. Trubshaw liked ...”

“... in one of many moments that reveal them as more sympathetic and imaginative than Jim painted them, took him away and sent him to school in France. He came back from Caen for the holidays via Paris, where he stayed with his glamorous Aunt Maud, an artist, and her husband, an art historian. They ‘redeemed Jim’s childhood’, taking him around the ...”

“... tell you how awful it was. This period has now gone down in history as the great renaissance, with John Osborne, the Royal Court, but most of the time, night after night, you would go and see wretched actors, and there would always be something in the play like ‘God, is this never going to end?’ and Gallery Nell would seize her chance. One of the most ...”

“... officers during the war, and now with Tito, to undermine the Bulgarian state. Frank’s reputation took a dive and his name was removed from memorials and museums. Slowly but surely, in the Khrushchev era and then under Brezhnev, the partisans were rehabilitated: there was a proliferation of Fatherland Front memoirs and public monuments. Dorothy accompanied ...”

“... long been the Sandy Koufax of American prose, executed a strategic withdrawal from the world and took refuge in the hushed bosom of his 150-acre Connecticut estate. Previous withdrawals into the protective bubble of privacy and hard work had been tactical, provisional. But just because you have a persecution complex doesn’t mean there aren’t people out ...”

“... military establishment and the new government in Washington, a town presided over by another John/Jack the lad. Profumo’s go-getting reputation and unstuffy demeanour made him attractive to the men around JFK, who liked that he didn’t seem like a typical Brit, never mind a typical Tory. He was extremely sociable, and well suited to the work ...”

“... housewife (with whom he had a lifelong ambivalent relationship). When Evans was four, his father took a job in Chicago and moved the family to Kenilworth, a new, affluent suburb which had been modelled on the English village. There, Evans seems to have enjoyed as idyllic a childhood as can reasonably be hoped for, protected and comfortable, even though the ...”

“... border is my only complaint in life. It was a shock to hear him speak in court. Entwistle never took the witness stand, but two long taped conversations between him and an American police officer, recorded just after his return to Coleridge Road, were played to the jury. His accent was pure Worksop. He said ‘coom’ for ‘come’, ‘becoss’ for ...”