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“... Montaigne, Thomas Browne and Congreve as well as such less remembered figures as the sea captain Robert Knox, and John Chilton, who, Macdonald speculates, was ‘probably’ the author of Voyage to the West Indies … in the year 1560. The penalty for wearing so much learning lightly was, at this midpoint in her career, to be patronised by the more severe ...”

“... force of repetition: Adler may have been introduced to these techniques by Kafka, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil or Alfred Döblin, but he mastered them by studying Goebbels and Eichmann and his clerks, whom Adorno called Schreibtischmörder, ‘desk-murderers’. The Nazi bureaucrats were responsible for two of the most malevolent fictionalising experiments of ...”

“... are furious remarks by the likes of Randolph Churchill to the effect that Eden was ‘a hysterical self-serving prima donna’. Thorpe is so squeamish that even when he tells us that Eden’s son, Nicholas, died of Aids, he doesn’t explicitly state that he was gay. Yet, annoyingly, his opinions on all manner of other matters and politicians, right down to ...”

“... in entropy, not to mention proclivity for paranoia, he shares), Harry Mathews, Joseph McElroy, Robert Coover and Don DeLillo. Often this distinction between Modernists and Postmodernists is artificial, and Gaddis seems to write in the gap between the two dispensations, between different orders of linguistic imagination; and here other peers come to mind as ...”

“... price of gold; and they did this while cursing the work.’ (In his Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621, Robert Burton condemned ‘that pestilent booke’, ‘not to be read without shuddering’.) Minois delights in strange, Eco-esque vignettes of doomed book-hunting obsessives, like Christina, the daughter of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who criss-crossed ...”

“... buses had all stopped, so I had to walk about three miles home. The next day, after an overnight self-inflicted haircut that made me look insane, I was back at the Commons. The guards recognised me and would not let me into the Strangers’ Gallery. I saw the fire alarm button, broke the glass and set it off. Although no fire bells rang I was in ...”

“... have been a failed expedition to the east led by Ingvar the Far-Travelled. By contrast, a rather self-satisfied stone from Yttergärde in Sweden memorialises a man called Ulf, who took three ‘gelds’, or pay-offs, in England: one from Tosti (unknown, not King Harold Godwinsson’s brother), one from Thorketill (probably ‘the Tall’, a leader who ...”

“... her: “John Peel – what? You mean the dead disc jockey?” And then I said: “Don’t you mean Robert Peel? Cos if it was John Peel, we’d all be known as Johnnies.”’ This gets a really good laugh and Jim, who is cut from rather rougher cloth than the officers from the serious and organised crime squad, develops his theme. ‘I mean, speaking of ...”

“... also a good deal of repetition. We are reminded four times of Blake’s maxim, almost as often of Robert Burton’s admittedly splendid description of tears as ‘excrementitious humours of the third concoction’. But Dixon’s instinct for connections and comparisons is unfailingly sharp and illuminating. He ranges effortlessly from Margery Kempe ...”

“... a nod to the 1971 movie The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston, one of the many adaptations of Robert Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, also a major influence on Night of the Living Dead). An enormous wall has been built across Manhattan, along Canal Street, and the area south of it, Zone One, is being cleared of undead to make it safe again for human ...”

“... never more bombastic than in reports of the defeat at Stalingrad – on the need for self-sacrifice to keep Germany from going under. Stargardt claims that his book ‘offers a very different understanding of the effects that wartime defeats and crises had on German society’ from that offered by previous historians. The approach he adopts ...”

“... cultural stereotype’: that of the pious female martyr, the embodiment of feminine self-sacrifice. The most powerful example in Britain was Edith Cavell, whose execution by the German authorities in 1915 for running a refugee smuggling network out of her nurses’ training school was useful propaganda for the Allies. British newspapers, which ...”

“... interest in the hidden dealings of the rich and powerful. Tiny Rowland, Mohammed Al Fayed and Robert Maxwell have all received the treatment and been carefully scrutinised. His account of Maxwell’s affairs delved into the murky depths, but he also kept a wary eye on the dubious ethics of the business world around the man, and produced an interestingly ...”

“... predecessors. Others, including Halley and his London colleague, the irascible natural philosopher Robert Hooke, had the idea that orbiting bodies tended to move in straight lines while at the same time being pulled towards some force-centre. Only Newton fully exploited its implications. He defined forces by the changes they produced in the motions of bodies ...”

“... to contribute to the wealth and stability of its neighbours. The scale of investment and level of self-interest seemed to suggest that the West was serious about the political and economic development of Afghanistan. In March, the United Nations Special Representative, Lakdhar Brahimi, outlined a plan for ‘a broad-based multi-ethnic government respectful of ...”