“... that read G.M. Trevelyan or the old Pelican History simply by trying harder is reminiscent of Norman Tebbit on the unemployed or Mrs Shephard on state education – wishful thinking (and ahistorical). Revealingly, the old Pelican series, which Cannadine himself describes as exemplary, observed what was then a well-established convention whereby ...”

“... to enlist our complicity with the villain: from Dr Mabuse to the femme fatale in film noir to Norman Bates, it is typically the villain who drives the story forward. The young man’s wink merely makes this explicit. Later on, when the wife manages to get hold of a gun and shoots the chubby young man, the slim one regains control by using a remote control ...”

“... happened, his fate wasn’t decided by a jury, but instead became enmeshed with the debacle at the White House and the scandal surrounding the Republican Party’s burglary of the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building. Nixon was never enthusiastic about using legal means to try to stop the New York Times from publishing ...”

“... aired and some understanding achieved. Contrast this with Question Time on BBC 1 last night with Norman Tebbit, Shirley Williams and some unidentified industrialist. Tebbit played his usual role of a sneer on legs, snarling and heaping contempt on any vaguely liberal view and the discussion, which was no discussion at all, was rancorous and rowdy and left ...”

“... 1908 and 1917, Verse Revolutionaries is decidedly about the pursuit of what Pound called ‘the white stag, Fame’. He had a knack for it. As a friendless arriviste in London in 1908, he self-published a pamphlet at Christmas cannily called A Quinzaine for This Yule and then used the fact that it had sold out to convince Elkin Mathews to republish it under ...”

“... All were born within a few years of each other. All are suitably telegenic. All are male and white and Oxbridge. If all three formed a coalition together, one would not at present be too surprised. Where are the new sorts of political actor? Where, crucially, are the really new political ideas? Linda Colley For the first time in my voting life, I ...”

“... birds, the larger reptiles, and so many more both great and small’, and in 1979 the biologist Norman Myers published a little-read book called The Sinking Ark, showing with statistics that Bertram had been correct. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that large numbers of biologists began to take such concerns seriously. In 1991, the palaeobiologist David ...”

“... in Poland the inteligencja is not an élite, but rather the broad mass of people engaged in white-collar occupations for which they have the necessary educational requirements. As Dr Davies points out, a large section of the Polish population has the urge to engage in political activity. The Jews began to appear in large numbers in the second half of ...”

“... that go astray or are misunderstood. But for all this, Kate never ceases to be a 57-year-old white North Carolina woman, with all her limitations and prejudices, her nostalgia for a pre-consumerist America and her well-meaning but patronising attitude to blacks. In the last fifty pages, which briefly recount Kate’s adult life, the language turns blowsy ...”

“... the ‘I’ (as in ‘I do this, I do that’) is the repository of all charm: the poems are, in Norman Mailer’s phrase, ‘advertisements for myself’. In Zagajewski, the charm is that of all the world. O’Hara, straightening his eyelids, throwing a couple of tangerines in an overnight bag, is personally and actively and often spectacularly ...”

“... people into her fiction more naturally than Monimbo manages with, for instance, Castro and Norman Mailer. Her good American English is laced with wisecracks, sad-funny like Woody Allen’s, clever-naive like Salinger’s. The English dialogue of Monimbo is very poor, by comparison. At one point, the Mossgrave Partnership attempts to create a ...”

“... the earliest extant literary telling of this phantom army, taken down by Orderic Vitalis, an Anglo-Norman monk, from the report of his colleague, the eyewitness. Walchelin related how he thought he wouldn’t be believed if he didn’t bring back proof, so he left his hiding place and tried to catch and mount one of the riderless black horses going by: the ...”

“... his calculation presumably being that the requirement of loyalty to the leader would allow only a Norman Lamont kamikaze candidacy and that Heseltine and Michael Portillo, the real contenders, would fail to put up and then have to shut up. The result was a political chain reaction. John Redwood saw the opportunity presented by Portillo’s failure to stand ...”

“... of the charred and twisted bodies of women and children shocked a world which, thanks to Norman Schwarzkopf and CNN, had seen little of the horrors of the Gulf War. Pentagon officials, who claimed to have intelligence indicating the bunker was a command and control centre, denied knowledge of the civilian presence. Had they known, the attack would ...”

“... and seeks to emulate (clear echoes in The Book of Dave of The Drowned World), but rather of Norman Mailer, particularly the vainglorious, dick-swinging Mailer of ‘The White Negro’ (1956): there is the same priapism, the same shameless display, the same gusto and verve, the same excruciating hipsterism, as ...”