“... had one child, a daughter. So he’s a curious – you could almost say implausible – mix of John McCain and Bill Clinton, though a few decades younger than either of them. According to the conventions of stories about fictional presidents, the novel strives to maintain the appearance of bipartisanship; Duncan never tells us which party he belongs ...”

“... Stephen Lushington, the dashing cricketer-jurist who represented the black men Louis Lecesne and John Escoffery after their unlawful deportation from Jamaica, was identified as the son of an East India Company chairman. The planters of Mauritius, which Britain had seized from France in 1810, were also damned as agents of subversion.When Macaulay & Babington ...”

“... it back and forth up the hill as it rises above the old graveyard at Killianan, through the hazel woods, out to the open ground by Balchraggan, past the Balbeg mill that belonged, my father told me, to his great-grandfather. Abriachan is the place of my father’s people, a district of crofts plotted across a basin high above Loch Ness. The Gaelic, Obar ...”

“... to his familiar attention. The balance is interrupted when, during an extended ramble through the woods, Turtle encounters a pair of young men from town, Jacob and Brett. She knows them from school; they know her as that weird girl with the scary dad. They’re lost. Turtle agrees to lead them back to town, but darkness falls, and they end up having to make ...”

“... devotees to complain that Americans have got him all wrong. As early as 1897, the radical John Jay Chapman presented him as a fellow iconoclast who had been miscast as an apologist for American selfishness, ‘embalmed in amber by the very forces he braved’. The tendency of biographers to make their own Emersons means that some academics dislike the ...”

“... their model cases, in particular the crisis of the 1970s, which involved the end of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, the demise of full employment as an aim of economic policy and the turn towards conservative and neoliberal arguments in favour of tax cuts and financial deregulation. In the space of a decade, one worldview was seemingly ...”

“... write a critique of an Arthur Ransome book, climb the Tracker Tree, or spend a night alone in the woods and write about the experience. Classes were voluntary: a young radio buff who had chosen not to learn arithmetic finally begged the music master to teach him long division so that he could work out the relationships between current and resistance. But when ...”

“... interests confined to Shakespeare: among those the countess patronised were James Thomson, John Gay and George Frideric Handel (of whom she painted a portrait), all of them occasional guests at the Ashley-Cooper family seat, St Giles House, at Wimborne St Giles in Dorset.My interest was much piqued by the fact that I knew the Wimborne St Giles ...”

“... slab into which is carved a replica of the covenant signed by the 25 male settlers on the St John, which was carrying them to what they thought of as a ‘new world’. In stark contrast, a recent initiative by volunteers to memorialise what is known about the historical presence of enslaved people in the town has resulted in the installation of ...”

“... and reward the interest of a mass readership. Direction, sometimes amounting to misdirection, is John Mullan’s topic. ‘As the title of this book suggests, Dickens’s artfulness is often an almost impudent trickery.’ To illustrate what he means by artfulness amounting to trickery, Mullan draws on a rather different scene in Oliver Twist, in which ...”

“... to dominate for the next twenty years and do all the things he would do. It’s not like Tiger Woods or LeBron James, where since they were twelve you knew they were going to be superstars … It’s not so clear-cut in tennis. It takes time to evolve.’ Federer lost his next match to Tim Henman.‘Every successful player compromises their entire ...”

“... concerned with postwar Japan highly classified, in violation of its own laws. Most important, John Foster Dulles, President Truman’s special envoy to Japan charged with ending the occupation, wrote the peace treaty of 1951 in such a way that most former POWs and civilian victims of Japan are prevented from obtaining any form of compensation from either ...”

“... is introduced to the delights of furniture restoration – ‘the pore and lustre of different woods … the frothed grain of burled walnut’ etc – isn’t, by Tartt’s standards, very long. All the same, the book leaves an odd taste. Much of the oddness comes down to the way it handles class, which is by mapping the assumptions of a Victorian novel ...”

“... then further fictionalising their situation in The New Machiavelli. The editor of the Spectator, John St Loe Strachey, a pillar of the National Social Purity Crusade (no, really), foamed at the novel’s ‘poisonous and pernicious teaching’, finding it ‘in its essence depraved’ (the book, it should be said, contains no description of sexual activity ...”

“... enable her to locate the severed head of her mother (Nivea, another symbol of purity) lost in the woods after a car-smash: this head goes into the hat-box in the basement. Clara is too pure to concern herself with her sons or with any domestic duties: after all, she has servants and Esteban pays them when he is not raping their daughters. Clara prefers ...”