“... Jeanette Winterson, not exactly unfamous, isn’t featured; nor is Hilary Mantel; though Zadie Smith inevitably is. Most published works of fiction are not particularly good, as has surely always been the case (and the situation must seem worse now, whenever now is, because the mediocrities of the past are soon remaindered and forgotten). But there are ...”

“... For example: the top five consolidated publishing groups – Bertelsmann, Pearson, News Corp, W.H. Smith and Holtzbrinck – were responsible for a whopping 49.3 per cent of sales in the General Retail Market in 2000; grim news for independents (News Corp’s figures include those of Fourth Estate, swallowed by HarperCollins last July), though in these ...”

“... points and a fourth hanging from one of the rubies. It was commissioned as a shoulder-clasp by John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, ‘years before his murder’ in 1467, and passed through various hands, including those of Elizabeth I – she can be seen wearing the jewel in the ‘Ermine Portrait’ that hangs in Hatfield House – until it was finally ...”

“... among his many books, seems to give pride of place to a blockbuster history of the Cold War. Dr John Lewis, editor of the Modern Quarterly, so far from being, as Inglis would have it in one of his punchy characterisations, a ‘hard nut’ of the Communist Party, was an ex-Unitarian minister, much given to moral discourse and retaining a distinctly clerical ...”

“... in the world, creating a lot of wealth for Glasgow and a sky black with fumes. The next Tennant, John, went on developing, expanding and diversifying the business, which already had a branch in the City of London. A multi-millionaire by the age of 25, John was a typical early Victorian entrepreneur, perhaps not even all ...”

“... UK’s forced departure from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in September 1992 had condemned John Major’s government to nearly five years of public disintegration, years in which the party’s anti-European ‘bastards’, as Major described them, reacted to the abrupt end of belief in Tory competence by doing their best to scupper his ...”

“... to practise my newly acquired skill. My parents were both readers and Dad took the periodical John Bull, the books they generally favoured literature of escape, tales of ordinary folk like themselves who had thrown it all up for a life of mild adventure, a smallholding on the Wolds, say, or an island sanctuary, with both of them fans of the naturalist ...”

“... of 1924 and 1928. On both occasions, FDR gave a rousing speech nominating the New York governor Al Smith for the presidency. In 1924 he lumbered painfully to the podium on crutches, sweating profusely, but in 1928 he walked with the aid of a stick, leaning on his son’s arm. Under the trousers, of course, were the iron braces that held his legs erect but, to ...”

“... between the appearance of Thomas Pynchon’s first book and the Beatles’ second long-player, John Williams, a professor at the University of Denver, sent his agent in New York a draft of his latest novel, which detailed the unhappy marriage, undistinguished career and early death from cancer of an imagined professor at the University of Missouri a ...”

“... one of Garibaldi’s generals called them. Duggan, who learned how to debunk myth from Denis Mack Smith, did not waste his time with the maestro. He has a similar eye for the absurd and the same finely honed prose style. Yet behind the fun he has a serious purpose. The myth-making allowed the new rulers of Sicily to pretend that the deep injustices of rural ...”

“... repeatedly, as in these three books, to polish a group of them with her calm, uncreased prose – John Ashbery, James Merrill, A.R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt, Charles Simic, Dave Smith, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham and Rita Dove. Vendler is in love with the lyric, indeed so in love with it that she befriends ...”

“... of Amherst’, dressed in that distinctive ghost-white dress, which features in the movie Being John Malkovich. A hitherto ‘unknown’ photograph of Dickinson recently advertised on E-Bay, the Internet auction site. Shady dealings in allegedly ‘new’ poems by Dickinson – discovered, authenticated, sold and discredited. I recently received a flyer ...”

“... them double agents, which had been MI5’s speciality in both world wars. Yet, according to Sir John Harding, governor of Cyprus in the 1950s: As far as ill-treatment, rough treatment on capture, I think that it is something which inevitably does happen. After all if you’ve got troops or police who are engaged in an anti-terrorist operation and they’ve ...”

“... in vain: not even English-language historians’ revisionist accounts (say those of Denis Mack Smith and Stuart Woolf) have got through to biographers. Osborne is the latest to write such things as that the Milanese audience at Nabucco identified themselves, ‘Italians suffering under the Austrian yoke, with the Jews of the Bible, and from that moment on ...”

“... bookselling so this process is only now underway in Britain, with Waterstone’s assault on W.H. Smith. In historical terms, a late 20th-century chain is threatening to swallow a 19th-century wholesaler (which has done its share of swallowing in the past). On historical precedent, Waterstone’s should win; but, like Barnes and Noble, it may lose the next ...”