“... Nazi years as a form of ‘inner emigration’. This was a postwar concept used by the novelist Frank Thiess, who stayed in Germany under Hitler and published a number of officially approved books. Thiess was responding to a broadcast by Thomas Mann (who spent the period in exile in America) in which he said that everyone ...”

“... and in some cases certainly do, construe this as overhearing a distinctive poetic voice.’ So Frank O’Hara addresses a leaf: ‘Leaf! You are so big!/How can you change your/colour, then just fall!’ and John Ashbery talks to a fictional reader who is not there: ‘Why do I tell you these things?/You are not even here!’ These fictional addresses to ...”

“... to discover a Marxist such as Philip Corrigan belatedly finding much to approve in G.R. Elton on Thomas Cromwell, or J.H. Plumb on Walpole. Whether Elton or Plumb would be pleased about the use he makes of them is another matter: Anderson, by the way, has a highly penetrating assessment of Walpole as Thompson’s bug-in-chief. So what special insights have ...”

“... in hushed tones of his own encounter with a ghost, we treat the story as evidence of just how ‘frank’ our friend is being rather than as prima facie evidence that he is fibbing. But if such distortions of judgment are the consequences of belief, where does that belief begin? I think it begins with the fear of being seen to be an unbeliever. In a culture ...”

“... Some weeks ago Sir Isaiah Berlin gave a broadcast in which he described his first visit to the legendary Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in Moscow in 1945 – a visit cut short in its prime by the bellowing of Randolph Churchill in the courtyard outside, hotly pursued by the Russian Secret Police. Alas, such humorous anecdotes will not be found by Berlin devotees in his latest book, Washington Despatches ...”

“... secret, missing truth. In less paranoid ages ignorance may just be ignorance. Underworld , like Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon , is in this sense a post-paranoid novel. When one of DeLillo’s characters thinks of ‘the paranoid élite’, we are meant to catch the friendly irony, the flicker of nostalgia. These are people who believe that the first ...”

“... odd errors: Waterhouse at the time was employed at the Zoological Society, not the British Museum; Thomas Bell, who described Darwin’s reptiles, was not a ‘physician’ but a dentist – and medical politics in the 1830s made that a wide divide. It’s a pity, in an industry where Darwin’s every word is scrupulously dated and documented, that the ...”

“... the appropriate Galenic text. That tradition – or much of it – has been revived in books by Frank Gonzalez-Crussi, a professor of pathology in the Children’s Memorial Hospital at Northwestern University, who has created a subgenre of his own: portrayals of the usual and the monstrous drawn from his own professional life, with a bookish veneer that ...”

“... was framed as an act of childish self-sabotage. Journalists kept calling them ‘defiant’; Frank Field, then MP for Birkenhead, dismissed them as ‘hotheads’. Justice Lawton, who sentenced them to prison, said the occupation was ‘about as bad a bit of behaviour as I have come across in fifty years’.The government was determined to extract an ...”

“... of his life. 21 April. Persisting with the Duff Cooper diaries, which, though they’re more than frank about his innumerable liaisons, are utterly silent on more interesting topics, the cruise of the Nahlin, for instance, in 1936 when Duff Cooper and his wife accompanied the King and Mrs Simpson around the Mediterranean. Years ago Russell Harty had supper ...”

“... I thought sadder than anything in Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen. I was also interested in Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Another September’, because I knew the house just outside Enniscorthy where it was set and I had met the poet’s wife, whose sleeping figure was evoked in the poem. What was most interesting about it, though, was the way it left the ...”

“... vividly retold (they have been best explained before in instructional texts, like Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson’s wonderful but technical The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation), and even hard-to-follow business dealings are presented with something approaching the same intensity. (I found myself in a state of acute anxiety at several ...”

“... has enriched our recent fiction – most remarkably, perhaps, the novels of Peter Ackroyd, D.M. Thomas, Beryl Bainbridge, Julian Barnes and Thomas Keneally, whose Schindler’s Ark was marketed in America (under a slightly different title) as non-fiction and in Britain as a novel. Writers of light fiction, too, have added ...”

“... the ground for the 18th-century Enlightenment through their intellectual adventurousness and their frank admiration for the societies they met in India, China and Japan. They lacked in these countries the military backing of European powers that laid waste to the civilisations of the Americas (and the even more devastating effect of European diseases did not ...”

“... fomented the Phoenix Park murders of Chief Secretary Lord Frederick Cavendish and Under-Secretary Thomas Burke, who had in reality been killed (on 6 May 1882) by Parnell’s bitter enemies the Invincibles. The Times in 1887 had made many other charges under the heady influence of a group of clever and unscrupulous young Irish Unionists who had captured the ...”