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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... feathers. ‘Distinction in garments’ was, they argued, invidious. Much later, Jacques-Louis David, the artist most identified with the revolution, was asked to come up with an alternative for parliamentarians, a costume that would evoke the dignity of the Greek and Roman republics. The result was a complicated outfit, involving tights, tunics and ...”

“... on those grounds ‘it would be impossible in some cases to fill the bench’. When the Labour MP David Kirkwood was tried for incendiary speech-making in November that year, the chairman of the bench turned out to have been a Conservative candidate in the previous election who ‘not many months ago was saying what he would do with the “Reds” … and how ...”

“... life – this was the time of her affair with ‘the heartthrob’ actor – going to parties, wearing smart black clothes from New York, jackets with wide shoulders, very much in demand, very attractive with her dramatic looks, wiry black hair, white skin, dark eyes. The character in the novel, Anne, partly based on herself, describing her grief after the ...”

“... and a tankard; a rifle is cocked in his hands and pointed out to the right of the frame. He is wearing the uniform of a Zouave, a French infantry regiment famous for its élan and baggy red trousers; he now has a full beard, his gaze follows the line of the gun, and there’s a pipe clamped between his teeth. It is 1855, and Fenton has returned from the ...”

“... become friendly and perhaps sexually involved with a couple of Danish lesbians, one of whom, Marie David, successfully sued Strindberg for assault. Not much later he married the 20-year-old Austrian journalist Frida Uhl. It was a marriage he’d drifted into, but at first it was happy enough, except for the wedding night, when he tried to strangle ...”

“... it is elevated to a sublime combination of nature and architecture, as if painted by Caspar David Friedrich, or by Pückler’s friend Friedrich Schinkel, then the leading architect in Berlin: standing in that allée of ivy-clad columns … you see them recede in perspective until they come together three hundred feet ahead of you, terminating in a ...”