“... The Spanish Labyrinth – until he was 50; South from Granada, his two autobiographies, St John of the Cross, Thoughts in a Dry Season and his two novels, were written between the ages of 60 and 85. In his unfailingly modest way, he made little of this achievement, and especially of the amount of work he put into his books. He wrote and rewrote ...”

“... a book which will demonstrate to a later generation that not all Conservative politicians took leave of their senses in the Eighties. He must therefore contemplate the last election result with mixed feelings. Since he has always argued that it would end that way – and that the Conservatives deserved it – he must have a certain satisfaction. On ...”

“... in an English archive, it’s still possible to make out the undissolved textile threads. Paper took its medieval European name from the papyrus of the ancient Mediterranean world, although the two materials were only superficially similar. Papyrus was made by laying strips of dried reed fibres alongside and on top of one another and pressing them ...”

“... them unable to provide the accustomed level of support to any deployed force of the size that took part in the Gulf War of 1991. The Gulf War demonstrated the validity of our case. In order to be viable, every armoured, artillery, engineer or infantry unit had to be reinforced from the remainder of the Army. This denuded the units from which ...”

“... you kidnapped me from my house, in my country, and sent me to Jordan for torture, and then took me from Jordan to Bagram, and I’m still worse than the people you captured with guns in their hands?’ ‘Yes, you are. You’re very smart! To me, you meet all the criteria of a top terrorist. When I check the terrorist check list, you pass with a very ...”

“... in 1944. It might be thought that Barack Obama, who won by 365 electoral college votes to 173, and took 52.9 per cent of the popular vote to McCain’s 45.7, really did make a success of his ‘post-racial’ theme. His was the biggest Democratic victory since 1964. Yet in Florida, Indiana, Maryland, North Carolina, New Jersey, New ...”

“... the broomstick feels unnaturally hard beneath his hand. His throat feels tight.He jumps.My habit took hold in 2006, not long before the last Harry Potter and Twilight novels came out (in 2007 and 2008 respectively) and the year I got a laptop for Christmas. It was a relief no longer to have to make furtive use of the shared home computer. I’d been ...”

“... Rita Hayworth, Natalie Wood, Marlene Dietrich (drawn while posing, clearly), Simon Callow, John Gielgud and Ian McKellen. (My husband, David, incidentally, is related to Dietrich – on his mother’s side.) The screenwriters don’t include Dorothy Parker, although I’m fairly certain that Bachardy once did her portrait in black and ...”

“... room where the soldiers were incarcerated became known – was written by one of the survivors, John Zephania Holwell, and stressed that the nawab had given his word that ‘no harm should come to us’: the deaths, Holwell said, were the ‘result of revenge and resentment’ on the part of the guards. Later accounts, however, claimed that Siraj was ...”

“... of the information that War and Peace contains. Even novels in which almost nothing happens – John McGahern’s, for instance – will speak in historical whispers, aiming to ‘disimprison’, as Coleridge once said, ‘the soul of fact’. Beryl Bainbridge was one of the last of the pre-Google English novelists, the last, you might say, following ...”

“... the year before Reich arrived in the country, and ideas about liberation which fermented in Europe took on a new aspect. The American establishment (notably the Rockefeller Foundation) started off by generously funding the seeds of the sexual revolution – on the grounds that if you knew the facts you could control them – and sponsored Kinsey’s ...”

“... this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I – I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference. Teasing Thomas about his hesitations between poetry and prose becomes in retrospect a rather darker meditation on choice and its consequences for both poets. Thomas, however, felt that Frost ...”

“... camp personnel, Gestapo and police, or participants in the ‘euthanasia’ programme). No wonder John McCloy, the generally patient American High Commissioner, complained about the ‘abysmal ignorance’ displayed by many who wrote to him. Frei brings out very well the pathos that attached to incarcerated former members of the Wehrmacht, and the ...”

“... hands of the murderous and unstable emperor; they would have remembered the public rioting that took place when Nero replaced her by marrying his mistress Poppaea (whose beauty, according to one of the play’s choral odes, rivalled that of Helen of Troy; Octavia, meanwhile, is portrayed as a model of virtue, but no one mentions her appearance). They would ...”

“... first Trainspotting movie, and Irvine Welsh still cannae act to save his life. In the original, he took the part of Mikey Forrester, the Muirhouse-based purveyor of inferior opiate products, the one who sold the suppositories Mark Renton shat out in the bookies’ toilet. And he was delightful at it, smirking and giggling in his Wattie Buchan T-shirt, like the ...”