“... or salivary glands o death take them lightly as the Colombian goddess who makes love to young warriors on the battlefield holding a butterfly between her lips. The exotic connection that this poem proposes, between a modern nuclear disaster and a South American myth, has an acceptably eerie quality, the symmetrical delicacy of the details ...”

“... Williams’s five boys. In April 1994 Maxine had left the family home she shared with her husband David Handley in Newark Knok, and taken the kids to live at the house of her boyfriend Alex Joseph, at Lobelia Close in Beckton. Daniel went to Beckton Cross primary school, and was one of those kids who’d talk to anyone. He already had girlfriends, and was one ...”

“... too fashionable.’ Yet only a few years after the Beau’s creditors forced him into exile, the young dandies were wearing make-up, enormously high shirt collars, stiff lapels on their coats and corsets to produce wasp-waists, with padding on the chest, the rump and the calves. It was in response to these excesses of dandy fashion that Brummell’s doctrine ...”

“... like Cary Grant. ‘Cary Grant’, after all, was an invention, an idealised hero made out of young Archie Leach from Bristol, his influences and his desires. ‘I guess,’ Grant later admitted, to ‘a certain extent I did eventually become the characters I was playing. I played at being someone I wanted to be until I became that person. Or he became ...”

“... powerful TV executives led him to become the editor of World in Action and then the producer for David Frost, both current affairs institutions. Still in his mid-twenties, Birt breathed tear gas while filming demonstrations, had a gun pointed at him in Bangladesh, and set up interviews in South Wales with implacable striking miners – by 1972 he felt he was ...”

“... as the major channel into this country for the theories of the European Enlightenment – or so David Watkin’s generous reading of Soane’s muddled (and, at the time, scarcely audible) Royal Academy lectures would suggest. These rival claims to Soane’s legacy are neatly captured, and subverted, in a cartoon currently on show in Sir John Soane’s ...”

“... the cover. Nobody will read their Divine Comedy as an ideal translation. Perhaps it will draw in young readers, but there’s an odd awkwardness to the street language embedded with the rolling names of medieval Italian sinners and elaborate scenarios of Dante’s tortures. The classics lend themselves to adaptation – the Odyssey to Dublin in 1904 or the ...”

“... are not variable confessions but different worlds, and different instruments of understanding. David Kepesh in The Dying Animal offers a strong sidelight on Roth in The Plot against America, a comic view of liberty and nation which darkens and widens in the new novel. Kepesh, divorced and determined never to make the mistake of marriage again, takes true ...”

“... more down-to-earth expression of the idea that reading novels can make us better people. Briony, a young girl who will become a writer known for her ‘impartial psychological realism’, experiences an epiphany after witnessing a scene played out – incomprehensibly to her – between Robbie and Cecilia, her older sister: She sensed she . . . could write ...”

“... patients, avoiding sociable contact with the staff and the carrying of a key.’ The third was a young British psychiatrist who, during his National Service, was assigned to a psychiatric unit at a military hospital, where he openly flouted the rules forbidding the staff from talking to patients, and ‘hung out’ with a manic patient in a padded cell at ...”

“... the Cold (1963). ‘It could,’ he said, ‘be turned into an opera.’ Le Carré – that is, David Cornwell, an ex-spy – once said that he entered the secret world ‘in the spirit of John Buchan and left it in the spirit of Kafka’; allowing for quite a lot of exaggeration at both ends, it’s a reasonable comment on The Spy who Came in from the ...”

“... Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but embarrassingly arch greeting to David Livingstone when he ‘found’ him in Ujiji in November 1871 – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – as well as for his silly ‘Stanley cap’ (like a chamberpot with holes and a tea-towel flapping at the sides), he has always been every historian’s ...”

“... Muslim’ and pray in a part of the mosque reserved for activists. Falik introduced Husain to the Young Muslim Organisation. Operating from the East London mosque, its members ran kung fu classes and football tournaments; they put up posters and wore T-shirts advertising their Islamic identity. Several had been in prison or belonged to gangs. Husain writes ...”

“... Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip ...”

“... Hebrew prayers on stage with a kippah on his head, wore a blazer decorated with the Star of David and, after school, went to classes on the Koran. After his mother died of cancer Begg spent some time being looked after by his father’s non-Muslim girlfriend, Josephine, who introduced him to Christmas stockings, Christmas pudding with silver ...”