“... There was little to suggest, twenty-odd years ago, that Superintendent Andrew Dalziel and Sergeant Peter Pascoe would develop as they have, except Reginald Hill’s unusual and wise decision never to write consecutive novels about them.* Their debut in A Clubbable Woman (1970) came eight years after Julian Symons had first pronounced the ‘detective story’ dead; as late as 1989 T ...”

“... and travel sanctions, then moved to cautious engagement: neither strategy made an impact. Andrew Wilson is more dispassionate than Brian Bennett, who was the UK ambassador in Minsk between 2003 and 2007 and remains angry at what he saw. Wilson devotes the first half of his book to an analysis of Belarusian history since the Middle Ages, charting its ...”

“... spluttering: ‘But the bloody man plays golf!’ While serious interest in the question posed by Andrew Crines and Kevin Hickson’s book – whether Wilson was ‘unprincipled’ – has long since been exhausted, what remains intriguing is the way in which his foibles, the hypocrisy and evasion that marked his premierships, were connected to broader ...”

“... bridge across the Clifton Gorge, which lost out in an architectural competition to a design by the young Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Sarah Guppy. Telford’s bridge was to be of iron, supported on two slender Gothic towers, standing on each river-edge. There is something intriguingly ungrammatical about them, severely perpendicular in style and at the same ...”

“... his playboy lifestyle, his motley collection of friends (Peter Mandelson, Nat Rothschild, Prince Andrew), his ready access to Libya’s sovereign wealth fund, and his recently professed willingness to eliminate the enemies of his father’s regime one bullet at a time? He’s a hypocrite, of course, but that hardly does him justice (who isn’t?). He is ...”

“... to the survival of the British nation,’ he declared, ‘than an understanding among its young of our shared heritage and the nature of the struggles, foreign and domestic, which have secured our freedoms.’ We cannot be surprised that some within the next generation do not value our parliamentary democracy if they know nothing of the English Civil ...”

“... Russia arrives in little packages done up in the same prejudice. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the young billionaire who was suddenly thrown into jail last year on suspicion of tax fiddling after he had funded parties opposed to President Putin, has made one of those abject prison-cell confessions which recall Darkness at Noon. How blind and wrong he was to ...”

“... and set the second half of his dialogues On the Ends of Good and Evil in the family library of his young friend Lucullus, which he hoped would equip the boy for public life. Medieval monks were fervent bibliophiles. In their cupboards, worn, faded manuscripts of the Latin classics and the Church Fathers flanked brand new Bibles and commentaries, beautifully ...”

“... world’, an ‘uprooted civilisation’, a place in which people can remake themselves. A young slave woman passes as a white drummer boy; the daughter of a Southern judge joins the Union troops as a nurse; two Confederate soldiers put on Union uniforms when they find themselves on the wrong side of enemy lines. A photographer keeps a trunk full of ...”

“... decades; I stopped for a while when I was an untenured professor, and when our children were very young, but I missed it more each year. My wife knows all about it, though I don’t dress as a woman when we’re at home; I do wear nail polish, and girly rings or bracelets, and feminine colours (last month she gave me, and I cherish, a spectacular violet ...”

“... presidency. Like one of his successors as Liberal leader, Charles Kennedy, he became an MP at a young age and came to public notice through his entertaining performances on radio (particularly in Any Questions?) and television. By the time of his election to the Liberal Party leadership in 1967, succeeding Jo Grimond, Thorpe had established a platform that ...”

“... have been a ‘prodigy of learning’: ‘At four years old I could read uncommonly well.’ As a young woman she published a five-act drama, The Siege of Jerusalem, in verse that nearly scans, about Saladin and his betrothed, the unfortunate Princess Erminia, who loves a Christian. Although Linnaean classifications were ‘too smutty’ for English women ...”

“... had become a more strident ideological statement than it had been during the previous decades. The Young Conservatives’ conference during the 1983 general election campaign offered the unappealing spectacle of Kenny Everett, wearing a pair of gigantic foam-rubber gloves, bounding on stage and shouting ‘Let’s bomb Russia!’ and ‘Let’s kick Michael ...”

“... after he bought the Spectator for an inflated £100 million last September, its chairman, Andrew Neil, resigned, signing off with a barbed tweet about editorial independence. ‘You can have all the resources in the world,’ Neil wrote, ‘but if you don’t understand what really makes the Spectator tick then they will be as naught’ (the two had ...”

“... Joseph Brodsky recommended him to the New Yorker, which soon published a number of his stories; Andrew Wylie took him on as a client; Knopf published his books. But what he longed for was publication in Russia. Appearing in the New Yorker didn’t mean much to him, though he understood it was prestigious. Unlike Brodsky, he never started writing in ...”