“... 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 ...”

“... to read the reviews aloud. ‘It is to be hoped that she will be recognised for what she is,’ John Ashbery wrote in the New York Times, ‘one of the finest modern writers of fiction, in any language.’ He went on to describe her prose as ‘a constant miracle’ in which ‘it is impossible to deduce the end of a sentence from its beginning, or a ...”

“... except in the peripheral area of Afghanistan and it is not clear whether the Eastern Europeans took heart from that defeat. Perhaps appropriately in a Marxist state, economics seem to have been more important than political or military issues in changing Soviet policy. We know that the Soviet leaders were depressed by the growing backwardness of their ...”

“... fought for his measure every bit as relentlessly as Alan Clark fought for animals in leg traps. He took on civil servants, Post Office mandarins, and was even prepared to defy the Queen herself. Then one day Harold Wilson summoned him and put a stop to the whole business. The Queen’s head remains to this day. In Tony Benn’s memoirs it is difficult to find ...”

“... of Edward Bond directed by Bill Gaskill, or David Storey’s directed by Lindsay Anderson, or John Osborne’s titanic hymn to misanthropy, Inadmissible Evidence, or for that matter, Alpha Beta by Ted Whitehead, Veterans by Charles Wood, The Arbour by Andrea Dunbar, or Caryl Churchill’s plays directed by Max Stafford-Clark, or the plays of Christopher ...”

“... reincarnation, poltergeists and the irregular behaviour of mummies. His challenge to Stevenson took only six weeks to write. On 2 September 1885 Londoners woke to find their city plastered with posters announcing ‘King Solomon’s Mines – The Most Amazing Story Ever Written.’ Cassell had organised a splendid hype. Haggard wrote two other bestsellers ...”

“... to have its closest affinities with recent cinematic exports such as Jane Campion’s Sweetie and John Ruane’s Death in Brunswick. (Particularly the latter, since in this novel Carey has made a brave and largely successful attempt to reflect the diversity of Australia’s immigrant culture, with all its attendant conflicts and resentments.) The Catchprices ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... written: for Wills could not only draw on the experiences of an astonishing twenty years which took gliding, and him with it, from a broomstick-and-bungey affair at the Wasserkuppe and Dunstable Downs to flights over unheard-of distances and a World Championship – he could also write divinely.On Being a Bird replaced Terence Horsley’s Soaring Flight as ...”

“... the Sun. Like the Journal, it is a paper that makes up stories, manufactures interviews that never took place and perverts real incidents. Day by day during the Falklands war there unfolded in its pages the most brutal, crude and unedifying journalism to have been seen in this country in – well, let us say in the lifetime of its unlikeable editor, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”