“... of what a writer is and how a writer works, on the order of expecting Herman Melville to be a white whale’. But it might be more accurate, given the clear connections between Jackson’s life and her work, to call it a misunderstanding of what it was (or is) to be a wife and mother. Jackson once said that all her books ‘laid end to end would be one ...”

“... an individual will. Thus, the significances divined by Wordsworth in, say, a ruined cottage or the white doe of Rylstone or by the infant James in a Paris street scene are not merely ascribed to things or places. Rather, they are discovered also to be there already, already existent, a sort of afterglow or mark left behind by one’s ancestors. It is as if, to ...”

“... modern scepticism that would erase the boundary between history and fiction altogether – Hayden White, already criticised by Momigliano, is the King Charles’s Head here – becomes such a bugbear. Not so much because it looms large in the discipline, but because it threatens the integrity of one conjugation of literature and history with false proximity ...”

“... was seen by his subjects in photographs and newsreels wearing military uniform and mounted on a white stallion. His famous surrender broadcast on 15 August 1945 was the first time that most of them had heard his voice; many of those huddled around their radios had only a general sense of what he was saying because his stylised delivery and imperial diction ...”

“... so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like. We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the Fitzwilliam. I take in a chance selection of pictures, dictated by which happen to be in range of available banquettes, and in ...”

“... snaps, is a necrophile’s delight: photograph after photograph, in tiny, eye-straining black and white, of crosses, graves, plaques, inscriptions, bombed-out block-houses converted into monuments, decaying trench relics, dank rows of cypresses, grassed-over mine and shell craters, obscene-looking barrows, and yet more crosses and graves. Some of the photos ...”

“... Reward. Stories of personal and corporate triumph abound, but narrative is put to other uses too. Kenneth Blanchard’s best-selling ‘One Minute Manager’ series combines the barely worded zen fable with the idiom of the children’s story. Other books use narrative to bring large-scale history back into the depleted scene. Robert Lacey’s Ford traces the ...”

“... stone tanks husbanded behind iron fencing. Flocculent green stuff glowing luminously beneath the white skin of Bunyan’s effigy. I expected, against all foreknowledge, to run into Ackroyd here. To get his word on all this. But that was not to be. Business folk hustled through, using the graveyard path as a short cut. I laid the plastic envelope down behind ...”

“... plane dropped its bombs fifty yards away. Instead of a loud bang and flying shrapnel, there was white smoke, in the midst of which were glowing shapes, the size of tennis balls – perhaps ten of them – drifting towards him. It was before masks, before awareness, but Mr Karimi ran away. He tripped and fell over, and breathed in a gulp of gas as he got to ...”

“... later, Thatcher gave her support to Iain Duncan-Smith, helping him to see off Michael Portillo and Kenneth Clarke. When Duncan-Smith proved even less successful than his predecessor, he was replaced by another Thatcherite, Michael Howard, who went down to defeat against Blair in 2005. In truth, it was Blair himself who most appreciated her blessing. When she ...”

“... Raffishly handsome and an occasional film actor, he can be seen to absolutely riveting effect in Kenneth Macpherson’s 1930 avant-garde masterpiece Borderline, starring H.D., Bryher and Paul Robeson. He plays the adulterous husband of H.D., who is likewise visually transfixing. Later, he would become a popular Bay Area psychic, a friend to Allen Ginsberg ...”

“... Ireland in response to the new threat, given the view of the former commissioner of the Met, Sir Kenneth Newman, that Northern Ireland made an ideal laboratory for policing methods to be tested out, before being applied to the mainland. In The Politics of Force: Conflict Management and State Violence in Northern Ireland (2002), Fionnula Ní Aoláin has ...”

“... and Sinatra; and the frequent company of younger men in theatre and the movies who emulated him (Kenneth Tynan, Peter Bogdanovich). All this is known to Conrad, but the subject of this book is Welles’s life in his art, a life that is made to hang together symptomatically. The chapters are centred on myths or archetypes – ‘Peter ...”

“... was so admired by Gove that she’s quoted at length, in a special box, in his 2010 Education White Paper, on the subject of the ‘new academy freedoms’. In February, the EFA sent the trust a Notice to Improve letter after an investigation found irregularities in criminal-record checks, poorly managed conflicts of interest and a lot of ‘purchases ...”

“... a couple of days after the Danes were forced into holding a second referendum. At the Treasury, Kenneth Clarke presided over a return to growth, but it was of no electoral avail. The Conservatives were comprehensively thrashed in the elections of May 1997, leaving Tony Blair with the largest Commons majority of any government since 1945.Dramatic though the ...”