“... be called as a witness in the contemporary American quarrel concerning multiculturalism by both David Suchoff and Judith Friedlander, the translators of (respectively) The Imaginary Jew and The Defeat of the Mind, and be ascribed a different position by each. (Interestingly, the 1988 English translation of The Defeat of the Mind, entitled The Undoing of ...”

“... and his text shows more than a passing resemblance to other, better, secondary sources – David Robertson’s George Mallory, Walt Unsworth’s Everest, Peter Hopkirk’s Trespassers on the Roof of the World, Audrey Salkeld and Tom Holzel’s Mystery of Mallory & Irvine. By contrast, Last Climb is not only well written, it derives authority from the ...”

“... of Richard Vinen’s superb history, the best accounts of National Service were fictional: David Lodge’s Ginger, You’re Barmy is a particularly successful evocation of the miseries and absurdities of the conscript’s life.* But Vinen, who was born in 1963, when the last national serviceman was demobbed, draws on memoirs, interviews and official ...”

“... chief solace of his labours’. He saved a lock of her hair, and began to wear the ring she was wearing when she died. He never took it off, ‘by day or by night, except for an instant at a time, to wash my hands, since she died. I have never had her sweetness and excellence absent from my mind so long. I can solemnly say that, waking or sleeping, I have ...”

“... not have written The Corrections to be optioned by HBO – the chamber music of our time, with David Simon our Mendelssohn – but he agreed to the option, and so the only thing that prevented his book’s debasement was an inept script that died in development. Kraus writes in Franzen’s translation: ‘To be responsive to literature, you cannot be ...”

“... Iraqis in military uniform were to be seen. Men were firing on the American column, but they were wearing civilian clothes. The risk of civilian casualties was inevitably high. Most of the Iraqis on the road were on their way to work, some were just curious. On TV the night before Iraqis had been told that US forces were miles away. Everyone was ...”

“... radio, time-saving and sometimes life-saving conveniences which he disdained. In the words of David Grann, whose compelling new book, The Lost City of Z, tries to make sense of the man and his last mission, Fawcett ‘ventured into blank spots on the map with little more than a machete, a compass and an almost divine sense of purpose’. He was an ...”

“... Dracula with Bela Lugosi. In their 1995 book Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, David Skal and Elias Savada recount the casting process for Freaks: In a Montreal sideshow, scouts discovered Johnny Eckhardt … a startling ‘half-boy’ whose body ended below the ribcage. The armless, legless Prince Randian was a native of British Guiana who ...”

“... and development of the great writer. He was born on a Friday, on the same day as his young hero David Copperfield, and for ever afterwards Friday became for him a day of omen ... Born in Portsmouth on Friday, February 7, 1812, Charles Dickens was the second child of a slim, dark-haired, pretty woman. On the night of his birth, Elizabeth Dickens, who ...”

“... Williams’s five boys. In April 1994 Maxine had left the family home she shared with her husband David Handley in Newark Knok, and taken the kids to live at the house of her boyfriend Alex Joseph, at Lobelia Close in Beckton. Daniel went to Beckton Cross primary school, and was one of those kids who’d talk to anyone. He already had girlfriends, and was one ...”

“... tell us that these boys are not Prussian cadets but students in a duelling fraternity: they are wearing – at the appropriate angle – the small caps that German students adopted in the 19th century; and their hands are covered by white gloves with long sleeves. The boy on the top step, the one without a sabre, is identified on the back as ‘Coco’ (in ...”

“... be that the character makes risqué jokes, or that he likes to abseil down tall buildings while wearing a pink Spider-Man costume, or that he’s actually just a pain in the arse. My intuition is that men are more likely to be described as characters in this sense than women, and that this is an instance of the habitual and invisible sexism embedded in ...”

“... and fitted down to the hips, with embroidery where it flares that makes it look as though she’s wearing a G-string. The whole sequence is joyously camp. The precision and lightness of the dance moves combined with the swoony romance of Garland’s voice and the humour of her singing a love song to a roomful of men adds up to the kind of sumptuous ...”

“... told him. 3 July. Today they said the suicide bomber was one of five now in Gereshk walking around wearing bomb vests. Three of the remaining four were thought to be Pakistanis, the fourth Afghan. 5 July. We attended a shura today – a meeting where local elders come to speak on behalf of their communities – for families who had lost relatives during recent ...”

“... Lee, certainly on Jordan Baker (neutral first name included), whom Nick Carraway describes as wearing her evening dresses as if they were tennis outfits.It’s no surprise that this insouciant flapper’s first move towards real work was to go back to Paris in 1929, when she was 22, this time to apprentice herself to the pioneering Surrealist photographer ...”