“... Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books,’ David Dumville wrote in 1977; and he was backed up by, for instance, J.N.L. Myres in 1986: ‘No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.’ In his new book, Nicholas Higham cites neither opinion but certainly ...”

“... to the Melbury area went back for generations. His mother was born in Melbury Osmond, and as a young woman she worked in service for the Earl of Ilchester’s uncle, and later for the earl’s brother-in-law. She and Hardy’s father were married in Melbury Osmond Church in 1839. As Hardy grew up he must have listened to many stories of Melbury life, and ...”

“... late in the novel when a friend of Emira’s seems more like a caricature of herself, and of a young Black woman generally, than the nuanced person we met earlier in the novel. That characterisation bothered me, but I was forced to reckon with my own expectations: does that one flat character help to underscore the point of a book like this? Books can be ...”

“... on a stock image developed over centuries, by painters especially. Brueghel in the 16th century, David Teniers in the 17th, and Joseph Wright in the 18th, all painted grimy scenes of reclusion and penury, with hints of mad obsession and radiant wonder. Cornelis Pietersz Bega’s alchemist, from 1663, adds pathos to the mix: were it not for the delicately ...”

“... Inquiry which that trial provoked. He followed the Hutton Inquiry into the government scientist David Kelly’s suicide and the ‘sexed-up’ intelligence dossier on Saddam Hussein’s mythical weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq War. He dissected the grotesquely delayed Chilcot Report, which described how the Blair government blundered into that ...”

“... internal committee was created to determine the party’s response to it, and a group of vigorous young Conservative MPs, in the shape of the Tory Reform Committee (TRC), made a name for themselves by attacking the government for their timidity towards its implementation.Here the postwar Conservative Party can be seen taking shape. Alexander Macdonald, a ...”

“... led to break and run from the service by some element in his relationship with one Mrs Bathurst, a young New Zealand hotel-keeper. Vickery’s fate becomes preternaturally vivid to us, but we never directly see either of the two persons concerned, or understand fully the motivations involved. The gentle and amiable Pritchard, a ‘woman’s man, struggles to ...”

“... about his second film, Le Petit Soldat, he invoked Welles’s The Lady From Shanghai, which David Thomson has seen as ‘deconstructing’ film noir. Une femme est une femme reminded him of Lubitsch’s supposed ‘failure’, Design For Living, and Richard Quine’s decidedly minor My Sister Eileen. Godard treated Hollywood as a kind of conceptual ...”

“... his personal jeweller for two hundred wrist watches that flashed both cross of Jesus and star of David. Such personal touches were far more Elvis than any of the books that had been recommended to him. Soon life would again be games with lascivious starlets and golden guns and awesome dune buggies. Soon he would be home again and primed for every day’s ...”

“... 1972 winner, John Berger, in denouncing capitalism and Booker’s treatment of Guyanese workers. David Lean optioned the novel a year later, and though the project came to nothing, Farrell found himself in funds for the first time in his life. After finishing The Singapore Grip in his two-room flat in South Kensington, he bought a cottage on the coast of ...”

“... not have been published had Frost not upped sticks and relocated his family – Elinor and four young children – to England in 1912. He was 38. He had placed individual poems in American magazines but no publisher had shown interest in a book, and the teaching he had undertaken to supplement his farming income was exhausting and impossible to do in tandem ...”

“... on the Blasket Islands might seem an outlier in Irish Studies, but late Deane was as quick as young Deane to sense possibilities.The previously unpublished essay ‘Emergency Aesthetics’ argues that the distortions of legality and state power identified in ‘Civilians and Barbarians’ have come to permeate America and its hegemony. Like other Irish ...”

“... and correspondence with his publisher, François Maspero. As the editors, Jean Khalfa and Robert Young, note, this body of writing – unfinished, restless, often agonised – reflects Fanon’s search for ‘freedom as dis-alienation’, itself a response to his experience of what Sartre called ‘extreme situations’: the battlefields of the Second World ...”

“... tapering sides marked with corrugated rings, like a rocket engine scratched from the final cut of David Lynch’s Dune. The concert was at the top, and in order to get to it I passed through an exhibition of art created since the invasion, Ty Yak? How Are You? One of the curators, the artist Katya Libkind, had left a comment on the walls: ‘Basically it’s ...”

“... farmers who sold up and took what capital they could with them. ‘From the famine onwards,’ David Fitzpatrick writes, ‘male and female emigrants were quite evenly balanced. Boys and girls alike swarmed out of every parish, every social stratum, and almost every household, systematically thinning out the fabric of Irish society.’About a million ...”