“... in an area known as New Town or Mile End, just on the outskirts of Portsmouth where his father, John Dickens, worked in the Naval Pay Office. His mother, Elizabeth, is reported to have claimed that she went to a ball on the night before his birth; but no ball is mentioned in the area for that particular evening and it is likely that this is one of the many ...”

“... correspondence. But most of it has disappeared. The collected letters are excellently edited by N. John Hall, but they run only to a couple of volumes. Dickens, by contrast, looks like amassing 15 or so fatter volumes in the Pilgrim edition. George Eliot’s eight volumes and Thackeray’s four (soon to be supplemented) all outweigh Trollope. There is a ...”

“... the cops had in December consulted a New York psychiatrist called James Brussel, described by John Douglas as ‘the father of behavioural profiling’. Douglas is the FBI man who inspired Thomas Harris to invent the character Jack Crawford in the Hannibal Lecter novels, so he should know. This is the psychological portrait Brussel came up with of the Mad ...”

“... This is not the first look at Henry V away from the battlefield. Several scholars in the 1980s took a similar approach, notably the contributors to the superb collection of essays on ‘the practice of kingship’ edited by the late Gerald Harriss in 1985, and Ted Powell, in his important book on the king’s administration of justice, published in ...”

“... with helping him make his all-important break from Henry James, noting, enigmatically: ‘It took time and it took blood.’ After the inevitable divorce in 1966, Roth was skewered on ever-mounting alimony payments ($125 a week in 1967) and taunted by Josie’s promise never to remarry and release him. He killed her ...”

“... status of the pig, which it describes as the most useful of all animals to think with, and so I took Allon’s offer as an uncharacteristically elaborate way of introducing his latest thoughts about the relation of pigs and money. But the offer was genuine enough. He had noticed, he explained, that the smell of leather bindings produced in me an invariable ...”

“... wrinkled, was appearing in person. The news was his news: if Ceausescu visited a chicken farm, it took precedence over everything else. On the day of the Armenian earthquake Romanian Television led on a response from President Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast to a message of congratulations from Our Prince Charming. Ceausescu’s thoughts, displayed by the ...”

“... did not accuse her spouse of showing off, but his friend Willard Maas remarked that no one took his hysteria, which he produced because he thought it required, very seriously; while Elizabeth he thought disappointed on the occasions Barker returned to her, because it might signal the end of ‘this great martyrdom which brought to her aid half of ...”

“... Ted Hughes has always possessed in his poetry the gift that D.H. Lawrence had whenever he took up his pen: the gift of joining his ego to the visible world so that both not only energise each other but seem aspects of the same display. The first poem in this collection, ‘Rain’, seems to give the essence of what actually happens when rain falls and falls on a bare modern English farming countryside ...”

“... That was the ethic of the British Empire; and when the empire was broken up, the welfare state took pride of place as the great British rectification. The welfare state is the welfare parish magnified, and the welfare parish arrived with Protestantism itself. Maintenance and medical care for the destitute were made a communal responsibility in the 16th ...”

“... to finance a playboy lifestyle. ‘They trained him to make Europe yawn,’ Shaw said, ‘and he took advantage of their teaching to make London and New York laugh and whistle.’ Queen Victoria told Sullivan he should write a grand opera. Dismay intensified when he obeyed and made everyone yawn with Ivanhoe. Then Elgar arrived and Britain recognised what it ...”

“... were not intending to add to it. But they were not to be ignored, in case they became offended and took away what little you had. Something of this is brought out by a cynical text that probably dates from the first millennium BC. It takes the form of a dialogue between a master and his slave. The master feels that his life is pointless, but he comes up with a ...”

“... Whites the Commission declared Red Terror against the bourgeoisie and set about evicting them. We took over the big houses on Novaya and Staraya Basmannaya streets, ulitsa Bakunina and others. We posted Red Guard sentries, some with machine-guns, and gave the denizens three days to clear out. They were allowed to take with them necessary furniture, the rest ...”

“... going to leave out the biggest of them all, the grotesque toxic-asset and derivative spree which took the global financial system to the edge of the abyss. That was the precursor and proximate cause of the difficulties which are affecting the entire Western world at the moment, but the causal mechanisms connecting the initial crisis and our current ...”

“... and things like that. I like first-person music.’ We didn’t enjoy hearing this in 1970, when John Lennon said it in the course of Jann Wenner’s ‘Rolling Stone’ Interviews. It was bad enough that Lennon had left the beloved Beatles to work with a Japanese-born conceptual artist, living in beds and bags and producing minimalist packages of ...”