“... being hit, Basil, it’s the frightening effect of shells etc that make you so nervy. I’m much more nervy today than when I first came out. The shift in the tenor of the thirty-odd letters of Aubrey’s I possess is striking. They are full of reportage, no better and no worse than tens of thousands of published examples of such correspondence. He describes ...”

“... as conclusive proof that her faith in mesmeric treatment was an illusion. Later that same month, Thomas Spencer Wells, a prominent specialist in ovarian diseases, delivered a lecture on the case to the Clinical Society of London, in which he described the growth itself – displayed for the audience together with a specimen bottle of its contents – as ...”

“... of revolutionary ideologies and ideas, including liberalism and nationalism, as well as the more esoteric Saint-Simonianism and freemasonry. Yet as Maurizio Isabella shows in this transformational account of the Mediterranean uprisings of the 1820s, Southern Europe was also a distinct geopolitical space, influenced by the rival forces of French and ...”

“... from France (still commonly regarded as the end of the Hundred Years’ War), he sank for more than a year into a catatonic stupor and was wholly unable to govern. The squabble over the protectorate – should it be Henry’s ‘strong-laboured’ queen, Margaret of Anjou, or Edmund, duke of Somerset, or Richard, duke of York? – was controversially ...”

“... in Barcelona in the autumn of 1936. Charles was 30, a serious fellow from Michigan; Lois was 19, more or less fresh from Kentucky. They had married earlier in the year and decided on a honeymoon in Europe. In Catalonia, a matter of weeks after Franco’s military uprising against the Second Spanish Republic, they settled happily into a political climate of ...”

“... 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 ...”