“... of a major new artist’, but the Observer sees nothing but ‘duff bravura and blank poise’. Peter Fuller, editor of Modern Painters, fears for the hyped Conroy. The Times Literary Supplement: a ‘sinister portent’. The Financial Times critic describes the paintings with care, but fetches up with ‘a scumbled emptiness’. The Tablet concedes ‘a ...”

“... have been known for years and have been drawn on by biographers and critics like Morton Cohen and Peter Berresford Ellis. Here the Haggard collector and enthusiast D.S. Higgins has selected about one-fortieth of the text and presented it in an edition which deserves to be called amateur. He has not indicated omissions by ellipses, the annotation is ...”

“... all day through an unvarying blue-gum landscape. The rains continued and the Macquarie River rose 24 feet in the 24 hours I was in town. It was just running into the gutters of the main street as I got on my train to leave. The Macquarie, or its near neighbour the Bogan, must be the unnamed river that figures, and floods, in Thomas Keneally’s new ...”

“... to such earlier romance memoirs and traveller’s tales as Robert Paltock’s The Adventures of Peter Wilkins, the memoirs of the Comtesse d’Aulnoy and the better-known Moll Flanders and Tristram Shandy. But Saunders’s readings lucidly reveal the origins of the continuing, ever growing eagerness of audiences to feel that what they are experiencing has ...”

“... South (a seat held by both the Tories and the Lib Dems within living memory) to replace Sir Peter Soulsby, who was standing as mayor, went virtually unreported. Leicester is not the South-East, where Labour will have to do much better, and the seat had a strong Labour majority anyway. But it is not the North. In the by-election the Labour vote ...”

“... spurred by a visit to the Great Yarmouth museum, where the man who sold the tickets ‘suddenly rose to his feet and spoke about the fish and their history, as if he was an actor playing the part of Chorus in a Greek tragedy’, Blackburn writes her own ‘Praise Song for the Herring’, versified from a book of 1881, which sounds a bit like Christopher ...”

“... first to get this amount of coverage.’ In Regent’s Park rows of old ladies were sitting in the rose garden. In their white skirts and sandals, they had an air of seen-it-all about them, pointing to beds of flowers and thinking nothing of cellophane. And maybe they had seen it all: by the boating pond, fixed to the bandstand, was a plaque engraved with yet ...”

“... tone of many of the instructions (‘Take gum Dragant, as much as you will, and steepe it in Rose water, untill it bee mollified’), and also because they take for granted the reader’s possession of competencies and techniques that are now obscure. Today the kind of food-letters in Peter Binoit’s Still Life with ...”

“... barons). The trouble was no one in the actual Labour Party remotely resembled him. By this point, Peter Mandelson was communications director, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were in Parliament and Neil Kinnock – scarred by having to defend unilateral disarmament in the 1987 general election – was on the long march to respectability and another defeat in ...”

“... are Sittingbourne, Faversham and the Isle of Sheppey, just offshore. In November case numbers rose steeply and soon north-east Kent had the highest infection rates in the country. By the middle of the month the council ward of Sheppey East, on the Isle of Sheppey, had an infection rate of 1917 per 100,000 – seven times the level in the UK as a whole.The ...”

“... MENA markets on the fringe.One thing I did see in my WhatsApp messages, however, was how much Peter Mandelson had been upsetting my Labour friends. How glad he was, he said, that the current leadership had ‘drain[ed] the swamp that sort of enveloped the Labour Party under Corbyn’, by which he meant ‘all the far-left extremists and antisemites’, of ...”

“... blocks of black ink that delete, or nearly delete, every appearance of the word ‘pope’, from Peter the First on. The deletions are meticulous and they read like controlled rage: a careful and unswerving attempt to erase a memory. They were made in the early years of the Protestant Reformation; in 1535 Henry VIII demanded that his subjects strike out all ...”

“... his Irenicum, which attacked Nonconformism as entirely without justification. As Stillingfleet rose through the established Church eventually to become Bishop of Worcester, Mortlock rose with him to become Master of the Stationers’ Company. In the same year that he published Order and Disorder, Mortlock published a ...”

“... a wine glass escaped a locked cabinet in the kitchen and smashed; Alma’s teacup and saucer rose from her hands, the saucer splitting neatly in mid-air; a huge piece of coal in the grate careered across the living room and slammed into the wall. On an inside page the Sunday Pic featured a photograph of Alma, Les and Don – ‘occupants of the house of ...”

“... been looking in the suitcase, I’ve been consulting other sources: my father’s younger brother, Peter, now a robust 86; family photographs; stamp albums; public records; other people’s suitcases; books; barely legible notes despatched to me by my mother, who has a macular hole and a keen memory and styles herself ‘Research Department’ – the kind of ...”