“... was founded on a crime (he deposed, imprisoned and some would say caused the death of his cousin Richard II, who had once been his playmate). Caught between self-command and the most crushing self-doubt, Walter knew how to rise to this part and bring it down in the same breath. The king is wan with care and insomnia – he is guilty. He is also ...”

“... own heartbeat: its sequence flatters you with what you want to hear. As the book’s narrator, Richard Papen, discovers the golden campus and its gang of five mysterious Classics students, so his yearning to find out more about this cosy world becomes identical with the reader’s, and a childish pact is joined (as in the best romances). Tartt’s writing ...”

“... Hotel; and the St George, a smallish building on the waterfront, was ‘the jewel of Beirut’. Richard and Liz once had a suite; Kim Philby came to stay. Dizzying deals were sealed over handshakes in the bar. Timothy Leary stayed here with some Black Panthers during his Middle Eastern study tour of revolutionary movements. The late Marquess of Aberdeen, as ...”

“... the middle of the 20th century. Can there be a proper history of working-class reading? Jonathan Rose believes that there can be, and after five hundred pages, 24 tables and more than 1600 footnotes it’s clear he has a point. His introduction (still more the publisher’s blurb) makes much of the book’s ‘innovative research techniques’, the need to ...”

“... Israel, the only English actor in a cast of Americans. He was sitting in the hotel bar as the sun rose, accompanied by some local cronies and a bottle of vodka. Panting into the bar came two members of the cast, jogging at dawn. ‘Hi,’ they said. ‘Are you up to do your exercises?’ ‘I’m doing them,’ he said, raising his glass to the ...”

“... a thousand people arrested annually for violating the law. The number of arrests in California rose from 1156 in 1954 to 50,327 in 1968. By 1998, there were 695,000 arrests annually in the US: 86,086 was the comparable figure for Britain in 1997. The policing of cannabis accounted for nearly 80 per cent of police time spent on drug offences in both ...”

“... is more or less the subject of the two most impressive stories in the collection, ‘Under the Rose’ (1961) and ‘The Secret Integration’, which appeared in 1964, the year after the publication of V. ‘Under the Rose’ is set in Egypt during the Fashoda Crisis of 1898 and has at its centre two British ...”

“... her own. Or named, as Clarissa is named for Mrs Dalloway, making her party for the Aids-stricken Richard a reprise. In fact, in Specimen Days, Whitman is not read at all. He is spoken, his words endlessly cited by the central character of each of the three tales. They cannot help it. Whitman takes over their voice. ‘He hadn’t meant to speak as the ...”

“... In The Crucible of Creation (1998) he attacked Gould, ‘biting the hand that once fed him’ as Richard Fortey put it in his review, in a way that made ‘a shoal of piranha seem decorous’.* The range of evolutionary options is tightly constrained, he insisted, and wherever there is life, on earth or any other planet, human-like creatures are likely to ...”

“... mere bump in the road, bump in the road. knocking a bee off his plus fours with an antique mashie. Rose Exile The parade floats trundle north along South Orange in the clammy darkness and floral decay of pre-dawn Pasadena, turning right onto the long stretch of Colorado Boulevard, following exactly the parade route of the celebrated Tournament of ...”

“... There is a particular shortage of intimate letters. Trollope evidently weeded these out. His wife Rose survived to 96, and may also have suppressed intimate material. There were diaries – at least in the early life – but Trollope evidently destroyed them in 1870. None of his close friends has left revealing testimony. A further problem is Trollope’s own ...”

“... been rigging the market; Frederick Leyland, patron of Whistler and the Aesthetic Movement, who rose from nowhere to great wealth, only to succumb to the maladie du siècle, deciding that everything in life was dull and hopeless; T.E. Smith, whose wife and daughter both had affairs with the maverick statesman Charles Dilke. As in a painting by Frith, here ...”

“... disasters in his private life, culminating in his terrible, doomed love affair with the child Rose La Touche. Once more, Rome, Assisi, Perugia, Lucca and Florence delight his unwearying eye. The experiences of that golden summer revived in Ruskin’s letters some glimmers of his old genius for descriptive prose, a genius liberally represented in Lord ...”

“... were so familiar to the world at large that the first theatrical point scored when the curtain rose on Trial by Jury in 1875 was the presence on stage of an actor togged out as a readily identifiable Lewis look-alike. He handled thousands of divorce cases, some well-publicised, some kept under wraps. The still famous criminal actions with which he was ...”

“... He takes us through the psychology of vision by a route familiar to anyone who has read Richard Gregory. There follows a brief account of neuroanatomy in general and the primate visual system in particular, where he has been somewhat upstaged by the superb new book by the visual physiologist Semir Zeki, A Vision of the Brain.* In fact, it is only ...”