“... The inquest on Charles Bravo in 1876 lasted a month and provided his parents’ solicitor, George Lewis, with the national celebrity which made him the upper classes’ favourite, and most expensive, legal confidant. In 1865, Sir James Willes wept as he sentenced Constance Kent to death for suffocating her little brother and hiding his body in the ...”

“... an oafish Thackeray, and Dickens’s biographer John Forster, who SHOUTS IN CAPITALS, as well as George Cruikshank the angry cartoonist.Male novelists, however, are peripheral to The Fraud. At its centre is the strange case of the Tichborne Claimant, which dominated the news and the popular imagination through two immensely long trials in the early ...”

“... episodic narrative. Her epilogue, set in 1971, namedrops the impresarios of the rock world – George Harrison, Albert Grossman, Jann Wenner, ‘Keith’, ‘Mick’ – who followed in Ginsberg’s footsteps. The upshot of this story, tellingly, is a failed attempt to relieve the misery of a Bangladeshi refugee camp. (Musicians fail to save the ...”

“... global commerce; the therapies of spas and watering places; the light, space and leafy calm of an urban residential environment – Mayfair, Regent’s Park, Bath, Cheltenham, Brighton, Clifton – unsurpassed before or since. Despite the indiscriminate ravages of puerperal fever, tuberculosis and (from 1832) cholera, and notwithstanding the perennial vices ...”

“... of the introduction to Krier’s latest book, is the architect of the presidential library of George W. Bush, now under construction in Texas. And Krier has disciples everywhere from Florida to Romania. He is the father of what his American followers call the New Urbanism, of which the Prince of Wales’s development project at Poundbury outside ...”

“... of the same imperial history, it isn’t surprising that one of its most successful governors, Sir George Grey, learned his trade in Ireland; nor that in 1879 the Māori MP Hone Mohi should have declared: ‘I am an Irishman.’ Perhaps it was inevitable that New Zealand would experience something of Northern Ireland’s internecine violence.I am thinking of ...”

“... in national terms. For instance, he claims that the 19th century saw the development of a new urban culture in the North of England. He holds that then there were at least three Scotlands: the Highlands and Hebrides, the Eastern Lowlands, including Edinburgh with its political and legal supremacy, and the Western Lowlands with their economic and ...”

“... a series of anonymous letters directed police suspicion to a young Anglican clergyman named George Edalji, who was the son of a Hindu. Edalji was convicted and sentenced to seven years’ hard labour. Sir Arthur, insisting that demons or ‘demonically-obsessed perverts’ had done it, accused the police of acting from racist motives and campaigned ...”

“... the man. The last time I read Roald Dahl was to my seven-year-old in 1984. I’d got to page 46 of George’s Marvellous Medicine, beyond the first description of Grandma: ‘She was a selfish grumpy old woman. She had pale brown teeth and a small puckered up mouth like a dog’s bottom.’ I’d managed George’s later ...”

“... is necessarily a product of pathology appears in an excellent book by Leo Ribuffo, a historian at George Washington University. Eloquently and thoughtfully, he examines the careers of three earlier political activists from the Protestant far right: William Dudley Pelley, who led a small fascist brigade in the 1930s; Gerald Winrod, who published an ...”

“... out’ and so on. Unlike most of Home’s earlier novels, 69 Things has no skinheads in it, no urban guerrillas, no anarchist street-fights. What it does have, though, as better-read readers will have noticed, is Berg, Ann Quin’s strange, half-forgotten Brighton novel of 1964, as one of its main sources, providing the Callum/Alan thing, the ...”

“... An excellent storyteller, he describes very well those figures from the past whom he admires, from George Washington to Ronald Reagan. Those he dislikes, on the other hand, are little more than caricatures: Thomas Paine, for example, was ‘a man with a grudge against society, a spectacular grumbler’. No one seeking a fair-minded account of the American past ...”

“... or reflective, reveals. Yet, when we get down to specific cases – whether sculptural effigies of George Washington or the painted flowers of Georgia O’Keeffe – we find that artists inevitably construct and invent their representations of American experience, whatever we may mean by this vague, polymorphous concept, rather than simply revealing a ...”

“... worthy of respect and fear; and how, even as the mysterious forces of cultural evolution lead more urban Britons to wander about without umbrellas and rainwear, hoping that if they ignore the rain the rain will ignore them, climate change is turning our innocuous wetness into a nastier beast. This is not some sixty-minute work of professional TV ...”

“... going mad. In The Emperor’s Children Messud experiments with new forms. Like the 19th-century urban novelists, she represents the range of city life by means of interlocking characters and plots; like the encyclopedic Modernists, she reproduces some of the reviews, interviews and society-page articles that make up the world her novel describes. (The ...”