“... Or should I say Ms?’ I smiled weakly, as I always do, and proffered ‘Why don’t you call me Rose?’ which created a little stir, as it is not my name. On the way back Mr Simister said that he considered it a great success, more than somewhat, and was sure they were all most grateful. My hands were clammy from the touch of the science fantasists, there ...”

“... Emma ‘the original desperate housewife’, which, cheesy though it sounds, isn’t far off the mark. Madame Bovary is many things – a perfect piece of fictional machinery, the pinnacle of realism, the slaughterer of Romanticism, a complex study of failure – but it is also the first great shopping and fucking novel. At least none of those 15 translators ...”

“... still no plaque at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham (now rebranded as the Macdonald Burlington), to mark the spot where Enoch Powell delivered his famous speech on 20 April 1968. Yet of all the speeches delivered by British politicians in the 20th century, or come to that in the 21st, it remains the most memorable, surpassing even the snatches I can recall of ...”

“... and expensive project entailing far larger commitments than it had made thus far – Washington rose to the occasion with a sixfold increase in the value of defence equipment supplied to the kingdom. The wall, which eventually stretched for 1200 miles north-east to south-west across the territory, swung the military situation against Polisario. The valuable ...”

“... strength of his eminence’, he was soon ‘laid carefully away among the heroes’, according to Mark Van Doren, the critic who is still, nearly a century on, the most persuasive of his would-be resurrectors. The same melancholy afflicts his most authoritative modern biographer, James Anderson Winn: ‘Any candid teacher of English literature must admit that ...”

“... Facebook page reached six million and signatures on Ludosky’s petition passed the one million mark. Eric Drouet, a lorry driver in his thirties, went on Facebook to call for a mass blockade of the roads; the call spread; similar posts appeared on other Facebook pages. Wherever you went, drivers had a hi-vis jacket on the dashboard, to signal their ...”

“... Thompson thought that was a short distance; she certainly never visited. Mabey is closer to the mark when he writes that she lacked the ‘skills of empathy and character development and plot construction necessary for a sustained work of fiction’. Lark Rise succeeds in part because it has no real plot; her best writing was recounting. Her powers of ...”

“... certainly a factor and so surely was jealousy. Annan’s military career had been brilliant; he rose rapidly through the Joint Intelligence Staff, becoming a colonel and an OBE at 29. Runciman’s war was odder and less distinguished. Guy Burgess, his first pupil at Cambridge, recommended him in 1940, on the strength of his linguistic skills, for the post ...”

“... contacts, not to mention a bounty of amazing beasts: wild mustangs from the American businessman Mark Dunham, panthers loaned by the animal exhibitor Carl Hagenbeck, three polar bears presented by a besotted Grand Duke Mikhailovich (the bears were said to pose on request).It​ is hard to exaggerate Bonheur’s fame in the mid-19th century, or the adulation ...”

“... and Budapest. Vienna itself quintupled its population during this period, reaching the two million mark by 1914. It was a city of immigrants, as multinational as the empire over which it ruled. It was a melting-pot, but only up to a point. The biggest immigrant group, the Czechs, were absorbed fairly easily, partly by coercion, as Monika Glettler points out in ...”

“... on the slopes of Richmond Hill as opposed to the ones on top, and he had draped it with black to mark the death of Gladstone. The Fairfields, though they did not agree with his sentiments, were again very civil and ‘smoothly expressed their sympathy’, though once round the corner they voiced their fears that ‘the good little man would probably lose ...”

“... into his own that enabled Forster to get over his difficulties, finish A Passage to India, ‘and mark the fact with Mohammed’s pencil’, as he recorded in his diary. The final achievement of the novel’s writing has something of the ‘slow crystallisation’ that Marguerite Yourcenar describes in Cavafy’s poetry. The ‘Greek gentleman in a straw ...”

“... centipede . . . In the desert we cannot find food and water for him. The villagers say that white mark on his nose will bring bad luck. It will make us die.’ ‘But you are not superstitious.’ ‘No I’m not. We will be more free without the mule. You do not understand Iran. If people see us without the mule, they will treat us better.’ We saw a man ...”

“... Norwalk, Ohio would probably fail. Suddenly strapped for credit – courtesy of Tappan’s black mark – Beardsley took the Agency to court, where the lascivious details came tumbling out. Mrs Beardsley had indeed moved out of the house, filed for divorce, and accused her husband of adultery with seven women, including a mother-daughter pair. When ...”

“... But it’s done with enough brio not to degenerate into an academic exercise, and the question-mark over the narrator’s real identity is skilfully managed. So, too, is the oddly touching relationship that develops between captive and captor, whose curiosity about one another is obliquely compared to Proust’s narrator’s obsession with ...”