“... straw hats; as time went by, the washbasins and baths filled up with pebbles and leaves (so much more beautiful when seen under water), and a trail of ‘still-lives’ littered the floors from room to room. It was Wilsford that gave meaning to his life and enabled him to combat boredom, and it was amid its clutter that, only three years ago, he ...”

“... remember. As the Italian campaign of 1943 slowed to a painful crawl, the British found themselves more and more dependent on the Americans both to maintain it and to mount any effective invasion of Northern France in the following year. No conclusive Churchillian thrust into the soft underbelly of Europe remained on the ...”

“... voices and accents: but I find the rise and swell of Murray’s free verse in his shorter poems a more satisfactory vehicle for the bruising relentlessness of his vision of contemporary Australia. Despite the busy narrative of flight, pursuit and quest, the poem’s plot is peculiarly static, and reduces to a tediously diagrammatic binarism. One need only ...”

“... his insights into the hegemony of the South’s ‘small ruling class’ which had ‘ruled more completely than many other ruling classes in modern times’. These were not welcome ideas in the time of Malcolm X and Black Nationalism. No less significant was Genovese’s prize-winning Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), a ...”

“... details the observations and deductions leading to his conclusion, but he does so only after a more or less teasing delay. Watson, if a close observer, could have marked what was chiefly revealing in the Marine – notably, ‘a great blue anchor tattooed on the back of the fellow’s hand’. (‘That smacked of the sea,’ Holmes explains.) But we ...”

“... comes as a relief when he expresses astonishment or indignation: his traveller’s-tales are made more credible. Since Jackdaw Cake is subtitled ‘An Autobiography’, between inverted commas, we might think of the book as ‘unreliable memoirs’. The first two parts of the book, about his childhood, are written in a strain of hyperbole, sometimes as ...”

“... Holyrood has today, but the mere prospect dominated British politics for extended periods over more than three decades. Three Home Rule Bills came before Parliament, in 1886, 1893 and 1912. The first was rejected by the Commons; the second was defeated in the Lords; the third passed the Commons, with the Liberal minority government being supported by the ...”

“... is exceedingly modest in scope. Khashoggi’s proposals for improving life in Saudi Arabia include more pavements, trees and parks, and better schools. His political vision is not expansive. Although he was an exile in the US, he doesn’t acknowledge Saudi activists or dissidents abroad. He doesn’t call for democracy, suggesting merely that the monarchy ...”

“... The idea Ben abandons is a high-concept story about a writer who forges letters to himself from more famous writers so he can sell his papers for a lot of money to a university library. What Ben ends up writing is something closer to the truth of his own experience, the book that becomes 10:04. Instead of a writer who’s a forger, the narrator becomes a ...”

“... banished Catherine Hogarth Dickens from the family home, but he loved his friend too much to write more than a few sentences about it. Dickens’s mistress, Nelly Ternan, appears only as the first beneficiary in Dickens’s will, which is included in an appendix. Where Forster praises Dickens’s ‘unbroken continuity of kindly impulse’, Wilkie Collins ...”

“... her wedding feast and a generous dowry. Jeffreys also paid for her needy cousin Jane Gorton’s more modest clothes, as well as her rent, and, when she died, her funeral expenses. Even her servants received clothes: Jeffreys paid her maidservants the usual low wage of thirty or forty shillings a year, but often gave them wedding dresses when they left to ...”

“... low taxation, many of its elderly members – and some of its politicians – have long held to a more cautious ethos of middle-class respectability, restraint and downright frugality. In theory, these Conservatives wished to roll back the restrictions of the socialist state; in practice, many of them reckoned that wartime rationing had been good for the ...”

“... the jury was right: such a ride is straightforwardly impossible. Chatham to York is a journey of more than two hundred miles, as is London to York. In the longest-established endurance horse race, the one-hundred-mile Tevis Cup, the record is held by a horse called R.C. Hans, who completed the course in 10 hours and 46 minutes; only nine times since ...”

“... his way through reform school before circumstances began to carry him in and out of prison, more often in than out. Impatient and guileless, he was easy meat for other crooks. A friend roped him in to do a job on the home of a wealthy Hollywood producer – ‘all we had to do was walk in and fill our pockets’ – but the producer was broke and Braly ...”

“... Valley begins to seem one of those uncanny spots where the skin between ordinary life and story is more than usually permeable. Through being imagined intensely enough, it becomes a signifying somewhere, a fitting place for a writer of Munro’s stature and provenance to project her beginning, connecting herself with a long tradition of gifts that have sprung ...”