“... of aristocratic families in decline, who retained pretentions to mighty connections (such as King John Sobieski) even as they subsided into ruin. His father Jan Norwid died in a debtors’ prison, and his mother died when he was only four. The Polish youth of the period was devoted to plotting and to fantasies of vengeance. In secret conventicles, forbidden ...”

“... novel had been wholly dire in their presentation of warfare since the Napoleonic Wars. Linklater took a middling position. In one of his autobiographies, Fanfare for a Tin Hat (1970), he wrote regarding his own Private Angelo: ‘War, in Italy, was a drunken, destructive and impertinent clown; to deal justly and truthfully with it, one had to keep one’s ...”

“... run out and that’s that. Yes, that was Boycott’s finest innings yet: Those fifteen runs that took three days to get. Boycott was born to give the Wisden bores The perfect subject for their lucubrations. He is the average oaf whose average scores Are averaged out in their long computations, Reducing you to helpless yawns and snores. Like small boys ...”

“... was held any longer. Even then the Junta did not choose to accept the Supreme Court decision, but took the arbitrary course of depriving him of his citizenship and expelling him from the country. He describes his departure even then as hazardous – 15 minutes after he had left for the airport with a variety of competing escorts, a squad arrived at his flat ...”

“... resourceful magpie of a ship-owner who disposed of his fleet at the outbreak of World War One and took to collecting everything from Chinese pottery through armour to French Impressionists. There were reproductions of his library, dining-room and lounge. ‘Lounge’ is perhaps not quite the right word: upright uncomfortable chairs, hideous panelling, deep ...”

“... told they had ‘set all the town together by the ears, which is the true office of a Puritan’. John White, the patriarch of Dorchester, and his allies, got a touring company of players banned, only to be attacked as a ‘counterfeit company and pack of Puritans’. It is one of the skills of this book that it encourages sympathy with both sides in the ...”

“... these strange games was a major pastime in LA. Aguy in the Westwood arcade once said to me, as he took the controls: ‘Now let’s get down to some serious Pacman here.’ Wittgenstein, on the other hand, is more of a minority interest out there on the West Coast. Doing both seemed a good way to get a sense of what it would be like to be a philosopher in ...”

“... of writing that the pterodactyl-like lady, twice widowed, and a psychoanalyst by profession, took over. Mrs Bradley – who is apt to provoke a suspect by giving him a good poke in the ribs – is nothing if not unorthodox in her investigative procedures. The early Mitchell novels (some of which have been reappearing recently) are generally very ...”

“... Grand Lodge, out of four merged London lodges, and in the course of the century the rituals took permanent shape around the legend of King Solomon’s Temple, while the Masonic message crossed the Channel to France, probably borne there by Jacobite exiles. In Britain the middle and professional classes have provided the society’s main support ever ...”

“... Brigade. In recent years there has been a conservative revival, apparent in the reappearance of John Buchan on the shelves, or the clean-cut manly values of Chariots of Fire. Churchill is modish again, and all the more so after the Falklands. Those who followed Southern Television’s series about the Churchill of the 1930s will recognise the extent to ...”

“... discovered that Republican and Democratic acceptance speeches of the Sixties and Seventies took different approaches to ‘sovereignty’. Republicans stressed the ultimate authority of God, which they implicitly separated from the authority of the people. The Democrats were more likely to bring the two together, stressing the sovereignty of the people ...”

“... Priapeville, Bordelopolis, Voluptopolis. There is possibly a touch more wit in the wry name that John Camden Hotten, who laboured in the dubious sector of the London book trade, gave to a series of reprints he published in the 1870s: the ‘Library Illustrative of Social Progress’. Another example of Victorian erotica, The Pearl, A Journal of Facetiae ...”

“... here, in more senses than one, that the author’s problems begin. The Macmillan family apparently took against the book that he was writing and has withheld or withdrawn permission for him to quote from copyright material over which it has control. The present Earl of Stockton is quoted as calling the author’s technique ‘psycho-history’, which ...”

“... our present Radio 3 ... fears every listener that isn’t listening.’ McIntyre’s successor, John Drummond, a more robust sort of Reithian, resisted populist pressures as much as anything by sheer force of personality, but a real cultural turning-point had by now (1985) been reached. In the prevailing Thatcherite contempt for élites the postwar ...”

“... lives. She speaks of the London press as ‘evil and morally corrupt’. From Whitbread winner to John Knox in four easy weeks. Even the friendlier Scottish papers were apt to harp on rags-to-riches, overnight success. Commentators should take this truth to heart: no novelist ever has an overnight success. Atkinson has been writing for fifteen years, and it ...”