“... Even inferior tradesmen had to be kept at bay. The Great Fire of London – the point at which Peter Thorold’s book begins – led to an outflow of the dingier homeless from the City westward. Some were absorbed in rookeries and Alsatias, packed with thieves and noseless beggars, or in the sizable slum which adjoined Whitehall. There was no welcome for ...”

“... postwar renaissance. Thomas Bernhard was the acknowledged leader of the dissident pack, with Peter Handke and the Forum Stadtpark group from Graz representing the next wave of an obligatory avant-garde. Jelinek was at the young end of this group, but gained instant recognition within it. It was her natural mode to épater les bourgeois, starting with her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... moral objections to Jean of Meung’s ‘continuation’ of Guillaume of Lorris’s Roman de la Rose. In France, partly because of fun and games in the Canard Enchaîné, Gerson evokes memories of clerical anguish about masturbation; students of Erasmus may also too readily accept his delight in belittling an author he had studied as a boy. Dr Brown’s ...”

“... in his own life between the working-class boy from Hebden Bridge and the glory to which he rose: ‘He spoke of his miner father coughing up his pneumoconiosis in the next bedroom to himself at home and of the 18 constituents who had died when their cage crashed in carnage to the bottom of Markham shaft the previous August. We were of an age and we ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”