“... A, was ‘the destructive element … the thing that’s not permitted’. More helpful clues can be found in the book itself, which shows Mira A’s illicit narrative breaking down in a riot of blank pages, typographic games and untranslated Latin. The novel ends with the word ‘silence’, a touch of Hamlet in a work otherwise closer to The ...”

“... Britain’s military campaign in Egypt in 1882. Subsequently, he attempts to redeem his reputation by undercover activities in Sudan. The seven film treatments of the book – the most recent was in 2002, starring Heath Ledger – foreground the martial aspect of the story: the extended British military offensive against the Sudanese religious leader, the ...”

“... a serious learning curve. The atmosphere on the London and South-East nine and under circuit can be surprisingly intense. Pint-sized competitors gather outside the clubhouse, doing warm-up exercises and footwork drills. The moment they step on court most of them become nervous wrecks. They lie about line calls and bicker over the score; if they lose, they ...”

“... into practice as the 28th President of the United States. Wilson’s Presidency was compromised by a world at war and marred by the reach of his own urgent ambition. Still, Wilson set the tone for the new power-seeking, crisis-invoking Presidencies of the 20th century when, in his first inaugural address, he ...”

“... score-settlers. This key office of the new masters exudes smugness, oafishness and fear (might it be their turn next?). Every so often, a clerk is winched up towards the ceiling on a precarious pulley system, a file is taken down, and another execution is assured. Once your dossier has reached the Bureau there is no way of avoiding the tumbril – except ...”

“... up the dossier on him. Billy is like a stage-manager: he teams up with Guy, furthers his career by getting him an interview with the head of the Communist Party, and introduces him to Jill in the hope that the two will fall in love, which they do. It is entirely owing to Billy’s manoeuvrings that Guy wins a respected position among the other journalists ...”

“... thought of as ‘straight’ history and her clothes have been stolen and shared out by her offspring, with continual squabbles over who wears the trousers. Intellectual history was tardy in asserting its separate identity and still has trouble in getting recognised – what is it, after all, but the history of intellectuals, ...”

“... Mantegna and Degas and many others. He evokes such ghostly optical presences all the more strongly by avoiding the direct references often made to them by painters or by ‘pictorial’ photographers. An eye with Cartier-Bresson’s deep artistic sympathy can register and store the traces ...”

“... achievement for an author of 28, but in other ways an inevitable one. Few novels are so influenced by film as this one, in its subject-matter, its narrative technique and the preoccupations of its characters. From the very beginning, The Beach announces itself as a book about cliché and fantasy, about the pleasures of life projected onto a mental cinema ...”

“... animals with an identical complement of nuclear genes – clones, in the vernacular – could only be achieved by means of the transfer of nuclei from embryonic cells, and then only in non-mammalian species. There were excellent grounds for insisting on the impossibility of cloning from adult cells. For, although virtually ...”

“... different lodges on cold collations, enlivened with mirth, freedom, and good humour, and animated by an excellent band of music. The odd thing about these reactions, and the difficulty for any social historian wanting to make them tell us something about the times, is that they come from the same source: Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker ...”

“... lineaments of national self-identity were fairly clear, but during the 19th century what it was to be British or English became a far more contested question. This was partly because the rise of manufacturing towns mocked the roast beef and Plymouth Hoe images of the ‘olden time’, but more important was an ambiguity inherent in the country’s ...”

“... were the only ones who understood the secret text, the story beneath the story. And they would be whisked away, club class, to an air-conditioned suite to collaborate on some long-incubated millennial masterpiece. They would pass through the curved window of the cinema screen, critic (tolerated fan) to artist in one snort. American Express voyeurs ripped ...”

“... stipulated that the bulk of his sizeable fortune – say a million in today’s money – should be applied by his executors ‘to the propaganda and other purposes of the said Society and its Socialism’. What he could hardly have anticipated was that Sidney Webb would use his position as an executor to deflect most of ...”

“... poets in the guise of a cruel woman to whom they are irresistibly attracted, but a woman poet must be her own Muse. Only a handful – such as Sappho, the seventh-century Irish poet Liadan, and of course Laura Riding – proved briefly capable of managing this double role, while Graves felt that no homosexual man could hope to ...”