“... but my love of horses is deeply rooted, and I had an exiled feeling.’ One does not recall Sir Philip Sidney saying that horsemanship and poetry were alternatives, or the Earl of Dorset complaining that he could not write verses at sea. But Sassoon has the post-romantic disease: ‘How futile my existence sounds! It can only be judged by results (literary ...”

“... every sense characters of their own have their Nabokov books: Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince or Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, though Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, which has all the right ingredients, was surely conceived mystically between the author and God, without Nabokov’s mediation. Still, Spark put her finger on the reason Nabokov’s ...”

“... a temple to a pagan god (rather than an art gallery) Little Sparta was exempt, he encountered mock French Revolutionary armed resistance. Over the years Finlay repelled not just the sheriff officer but – even after his death in 2006 – biographers too; anthologists often don’t know what to do with him either. His experiences with publishers were not ...”

“... Europe’s other most senior Catholic, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, or with Charles’s son Philip II of Spain. Pierluigi Farnese, the eldest son of one pope during this time, was widely accused of raping a 24-year-old bishop, hastening the unfortunate young man’s death (Farnese was later murdered by subordinates of Charles V), while another Holy ...”

“... life. As epigraph to that bizarre document, Mangan quoted two lines he claimed to have found in Philip Massinger, though no one else has found them there: ‘A heavy shadow lay/On that boy’s spirit: he was not of his fathers.’ Mangan was the second son of James Mangan and his wife, Catherine. His father, for a time a teacher in a hedge school, married ...”

“... Welty and Terry Southern (author of The Magic Christian and the famously dirty book Candy); or the French New Novelist Nathalie Sarraute, who singled out Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett as (after the demise of Woolf) the most original and distinctive voices in British writing. Southern managed to coax out of Green, who was notoriously inarticulate (and not just ...”

“... demons, often in obscure psychic concert with another man, dead or alive. Maxim kills Rebecca, Philip kills his cousin Rachel by an act of omission, and Julius, true to his overwrought foreign nature, wastes four women in all. These examples are taken from the novels, but the short stories, some very warped indeed, are full of them. Such murders are never ...”

“... everyone knows they don’t believe in. Never mind the few genuine Brexiteers. Amber Rudd, Philip Hammond and Theresa May – among others in government – all tried to keep the UK in the European Union. Now they are trying to take it out again, apparently on the terms that will do their country most damage. There’s a kind explanation, a ...”

“... a lot – a mode of viewing that is ‘critical-paranoid’ (I mean this term positively, as Philip K. Dick did when he defined the paranoiac as a person hell-bent on the truth). In the mid-19th century a French painter might remove any evidence of industrial production from his beautiful landscapes, while his American ...”

“... at least a dozen candidates for the succession had been identified, with James jostling alongside Philip II of Spain’s daughter Isabella Clara Eugenia and his own English-born first cousin Arbella Stuart.The term ‘regime change’ was coined in the US in the 1920s, but Doran applies it to the dynastic shift in 1603, which ‘despite all the contradictory ...”

“... Robert, Lord Rich, who in 1581 married Penelope Devereux, sister of the Earl of Essex. She was Sir Philip Sidney’s inamorata, the Stella of Astrophil and Stella. This is not a very auspicious connection, however, as cousin Rich is punningly guyed throughout Astrophil, and painted as a coarse, heartless booby. In 1564, aged 13, he was admitted as a ...”

“... Ministry of Agriculture. What is rather surprising is that at least three of the characters – Philip Schnäbele, Jean-Yves Fréhaut and Catherine Lechardoy – actually exist, and have simply been plonked into the book. Understandably, they took it badly: they are represented, like many characters in Houellebecq’s novels, as pointless and ...”

“... awaited by the enthusiasts of war’. The enthusiasts can’t agree whether the figures are French or German or Spanish. Some peer through spyglasses, as though seeing them more closely will reveal the new information the courier’s mailbag holds. What might be a walled town is visible to one side, conjuring the world of battles and sieges that the ...”

“... My maternal grandfather, Abram, who spoke several languages (Yiddish, Russian, German, English, French, with smatterings of Turkish and Arabic), left Ukraine to escape conscription into the tsar’s army and made his way hair-raisingly across Europe to end up in Liverpool. His wife, Elizabeth, no less enterprising, left Ukraine in search of work, also ...”

“... Liberty Tree – as she does – that it ‘attacks contemporary Unionism for betraying the French and Irish Republican principles of ’98’. You can’t ‘betray’ what you never subscribed to, and Unionism evolved in direct opposition to those enlightened principles. What Paulin is deploring, in this book, is one kind of discontinuity, the ...”