“... Fleet River, dossing down near Smithfield Market, finds himself following in the footsteps of John Betjeman and his Cloth Fair blue plaque. It’s impossible to get away. Legions of the infamously famous, settling on a pleasantly obscure corner of London in which to ferment quiet subversion, find themselves part of the franchise: the freedom offered by ...”

“... become a winner, to lift yourself out of the group and leave all those losers behind. But unlike John Ford or Jean Renoir – whose Toni also tells a story of tragic love among migrant workers – Malick conveys scant sense of the group, the living relationships, concordant or discordant, that bind people together. Like the outlaw couple in Badlands, the ...”

“... left to the imagination about what could happen if a mistake on the order of 1914 were made again. John Kennedy read The Guns of August as a parable of the Cuban Missile Crisis. ‘I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time [called] “The Missiles of October”,’ his brother Robert quotes him as ...”

“... sat so Martin could walk; Martin walked so Obama could run; Obama is running so we all can fly!’ John McCain, hapless Republican candidate in 2008, charged that his rival was a lightweight international ‘celebrity’, like Britney Spears. To many white liberals, however, Obama seemed to guarantee instant redemption from the crimes of a democracy built on ...”

“... even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in some imaginary Big House. But it was ...”

“... White Malice also discusses Nkrumah’s diplomatic failures – not least his decision to put Major General Henry Templer Alexander, a British officer appointed as Ghana’s interim chief of defence, in charge of overseeing Accra’s diplomatic mission to Léopoldville. Alexander didn’t speak French; he was close to the American ambassador, Clare Hayes ...”

“... here in the real world, the standard work on him is The Mystical Messiah by Gershom Scholem, whose Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism is cited by Tokarczuk in an afterword as ‘foundational’ to the research she did for her enormous novel. The Sabbateans persisted long after their leader’s apostasy, meeting in secret, studying the Kabbalah, practising their ...”

“... This was to prove disastrous. A lot then depended on the leaders of Syria’s opposition. A major meeting was convened in Antalya in southern Turkey. One of the most respected Syrian exiles, Burhan Ghalioun, a Sunni Muslim from Homs who taught political sociology at the Sorbonne, explained his refusal to attend: ‘It is a collection of many of those ...”

“... and 3000 of the rapidly produced 1860 second edition – books offered for sale by the publisher John Murray at the same time included 7600 copies of an account of the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin and 3200 copies of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help. From 1860 to 1865, the monthly sales of ‘the book that made the modern ...”

“... had another connection to Jane Elgee before her marriage. In a letter to his son William in 1921, John Butler Yeats wrote of Jane Wilde: ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when the circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it.’ Butt enjoyed various romances, and was, on occasion, heckled at public meetings by the ...”

“... truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in unwarranted embarrassment, loss of face, emotional or physical pain, or nervous or psychiatric collapse’. He said that the ‘communication and ...”

“... 1981 expressly prohibits research into how jurors arrive at the verdicts they do. When, therefore, John Jackson complains in The Criminal Law Review that we recommend relaxation of the restriction on hearsay evidence in the absence of empirical evidence on how juries respond to hearsay evidence, my response is: yes, indeed. I only wish we did, or could, have ...”

“... on press freedom seems to evoke little outrage. If American police ransacked the offices of a major broadcasting network, seizing vast amounts of tapes and documents, I do not think the responsible official would remain in office long. The law seems to me to have a curious effect on the press in Britain. It discourages journalism that matters: the ...”

“... be afraid to phone the police about something like a house break-in. ‘It would be a subject of major concern in any society,’ Ms O’Hagan said, ‘that lawyers were subject to harassment and threats from the police. In one where lawyers were subsequently murdered ...’ Ms O’Hagan stopped speaking for a second. She seemed to be thinking about what it ...”

“... and newspaper headline, impression and chronicle. For the middlebrow modernism of U.S.A., John Dos Passos shrewdly kept those registers apart, offering them separately on the page under the headings camera eye and newsreel. Here they are mashed together, and the effect is distinctly lumpy. There’s a reference to Firbank late in the book and perhaps ...”