“... Augustus – in the battle of Perugia of 41 BC. Propertius chiefly wrote about a mistress – who may have been made up, or a courtesan, or a matron, or a fantasy fusion of all three – called Cynthia. Her name is the first word in the first poem of the first book, which begins ‘Cynthia prima’, ‘Cynthia first’. This ...”

“... in both cases the bombers were shot dead, with no pilgrims killed. People in Baghdad worry that IS may be preparing some spectacular atrocity, like the bomb in a refrigerator truck that blew up in the Karada district of the capital on 3 July 2016, killing 324 people. But the IS-held towns and villages around Baghdad, where suicide bombers used to be trained ...”

“... are not much use as a guide to the subject. Bohemia is a country of the mind, a flying island that may land anywhere and take off again just as quickly. No sooner have the upwardly mobile middle classes discovered it, in Greenwich Village or Montparnasse, than it is gone, vanishing on contact with gentrification. Conversely, it ...”

“... be squared with democratic ideals of political and civic equality? Before the Jubilee the dilemma may have looked insoluble. One proposal was that the Queen should slum it a bit more, perhaps through a spot of biking – the so-called Dutch model of monarchy. Further possibilities for down-marketing readily suggest themselves: the monarch could do something ...”

“... homesickness.’ Homesick for Buchenwald? Fateless does not fit into any convention there may be for fiction about the Holocaust and the camps. On the very first page we meet in Gyuri an observant, detached, self-obsessed boy who notices all details with crystal precision, and yet has no interest in the motives of other people, or in the background to ...”

“... be ashamed. It was a mind which as yet had found few opportunities for action, but ‘as a dog may have its day’, so perhaps her time would come ‘to declare it in deeds’, rather than only in words. It was May 1549 and too early for Elizabeth even to imagine a significant political role for herself. These were ...”

“... Henry James was a generous correspondent in more senses than one, but his fellow writers may have found some of the Master’s letters rather exasperating. ‘I read your current novel with pleasure,’ he wrote to William Dean Howells in 1880, ‘but I don’t think the subject fruitful, & I suspect that much of the public will agree with me ...”

“... collegial government. The question why this should have been so also yields answers which may apply to many, even most cases. The most obvious explanation might seem to be pathological: the personal inadequacy of monarchs who were unfit for the burdens imposed on them by the lottery of inheritance and who could not manage without their mayors of the ...”

“... from thirty years before. A third case from twenty years ago, in which a colleague of Rebus’s may have framed an innocent man, has been revived by media interest. And as the novel begins a man who works for an oil company is kidnapped, tied up, and plunges to his death on spiked railings outside a block of flats. Then Bible John himself – an oil man, we ...”

“... which are many, belong not to real life but to acted and filmed performance. The performance may be taken to represent life, but, here as in Cassavetes’s subsequent films, it is closer to a kind of allegory, a symbolic transposition of life into the realm of actors acting, than to a lifelike representation. Rather than there being any imitation of ...”

“... be something a little suspect about being so well respected by fellow practitioners: the appeal may not extend to ordinary readers. And this is the danger with the Hoke Moseley books: so little seems to be happening that the straight-ahead pleasures of crime fiction are lost. Crime fiction is so dependent on suspense and momentum that Willeford can seem ...”

“... weakly, four times to the earth (perhaps one of the manacles is hammered into a boulder). Orc may in Blake’s view be essentially Los’s doing, Los’s emanation, but Los may also in some sense – literal or mental – have forged the manacles. The bloody form of revolution may be ...”

“... and Somalia, for example – is extremely difficult to measure, so it’s possible that there may be a bigger shortwave audience out there than we know. Where audiences can listen to the World Service on the better quality FM, they do so. But FM transmitters have limited reach beyond urban areas, and in many parts of the world they are prohibitively ...”

“... considering the question, ‘What is an author?’ The two, needless to say, never met. Foucault may have visited Texas on one of his lecture tours, but Junior, as far as it is known, never took his S&M revelry beyond the Ivy League – novelists will have to invent a chance encounter in a basement club in Austin. Moreover, Junior’s general ignorance of ...”

“... Gloucestershire hospital: ‘when the money ran out’, according to one of her nephews, though it may also have had something to do with the creation of the NHS. My great-uncle remembered visiting her once in the late 1940s: the ward was large and crowded, he recalled half a century later, a ‘thoroughly wretched’ place. ‘Lying in bed, she stared up at ...”