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“... got there before he did – not only Bruccoli and Le Vot, but the earlier Fitzgerald biographers, Andrew Turnbull and Arthur Mizener, Zelda’s biographer Nancy Milford, and Sara Mayfield, author of Exiles from Paradise. Mellow relies so heavily upon his predecessors, in fact, that Fitzgerald fans who have only recently read the Le Vot book may find passages ...”

“... seems to have been a meeting with George Saintsbury in Bath. According to Kipling’s biographer Andrew Lycett, the pair discussed the ‘sense of fellowship felt by people who had shared a powerful joint experience – whether fighting in war, or membership of a Mason’s lodge, even familiarity with the works of an author such as Austen’. Kipling decided ...”

“... of state has sailed on as though it made very little difference that the man on the bridge was Andrew Johnson and not Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and not McKinley, Mrs Wilson and not Woodrow Wilson, Truman and not Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and not Kennedy, Ford and not Nixon, or even that there was nobody in the White House at all – as under Reagan. In ...”

“... were Lithuanian Jews who settled in the East End and made the familiar move to Hampstead; that the young Goodman’s environment, though far from rich, was civilised, offering good food, good music, much kindness and a tolerance of learning. (These Jewish origins, and a continuing fidelity to the culture, are important, though David Selbourne, as his title ...”

“... from the Conservative Party. Its two transport frontbenchers in the Commons, up-and-coming young hopefuls called Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine, welcomed the transfer, and specifically stated that this would enable the Council, if it felt like it, to hold transport fares down with a subsidy from the rates. Labour won back the GLC in 1973, but ...”

“... reconciled decree,/Rebelling Angels, the Forbidden Tree,/Heaven, Hell, Earth, Chaos, all’, in Andrew Marvell’s famous summary. Yet this obsession with origins exists in tense competition with an insistent present: Paradise Lost was decades in the making, but in its final form it broods on the contemporary situation, the failure of the English ...”

“... autobiographical. Things has, so to speak, a joint protagonist in Jérôme and Sylvie, a pair of young market researchers whose story is narrated almost entirely in the third person plural. Obsessed with a colour-supplement fantasy of gracious and fashionable living, Jérôme and Sylvie start out in hope but gradually sink into the mire as the story ...”

“... and dialect and fold on the page; even the wonderful Rose, Green, Red etc Fairy Books of Andrew Lang, on which Angela Carter was brought up, and which she invokes as her model, have their tedious moments, perhaps because the ladies Lang employed to collect and transcribe improved them in the modest fashion of the day, erasing some of the raunchiness ...”

“... off her head. A few Pritchettian genteel-weirdos are to be chanced upon around the margins of young Kingsley’s suburban London childhood, but the general picture of those years is as blurred for us as it evidently is, and maybe was, for him. (And no, we do not get told whose idea it was to call him Kingsley – some thing to do with Charles of that ...”

“... of the press corps, were in constant hazard. Julian Manyon of ITN, Angus Roxburgh of BBC TV and Andrew Harding of BBC World Service routinely drove over the (very fluid) front lines. My own former colleague, Steve LeVine – who covers Central Asia and the Caucasus for the Financial Times – survived a shell burst ten yards away: his driver deserted ...”

“... assistant demonstrator at the College Street Medical School at the raw age of 18, a dandified young man, idolised by his students. It was there that scandal first struck. Anatomists required bodies, but cadavers were in short supply (Burke and Hare were soon to find a novel solution to this bottleneck). As Ruth Richardson argues in her original anatomy of ...”

“... it? Chaucer would certainly have thought so. For the Marriage of His Royal Highness Prince Andrew and Miss Sarah Ferguson all the birds of Roxburghshire danced on the lawns as the helicopter snatched up the young couple While royal ghosts in silence     Bend at the register And gaze into the letters     That ...”

“... Joy and No Fun inspired me to think differently about my own experience as a parent,’ Andrew Solomon observed in his New York Times review. ‘Over and over again, I find myself bored by what I’m doing with my children: how many times can we read Angelina Ballerina or watch a Bob the Builder video? And yet I remind myself that such intimate ...”

“... immediately, when a jeune fille came aboard the Boudeuse as the anchor was being lowered: ‘The young girl negligently let fall a cloth which covered her, and appeared to everyone’s eyes as Venus had revealed herself to the Phrygian shepherd. She had the goddess’s celestial form.’ Thus Tahiti discovered itself to Paris, in Bougainville’s published ...”

“... spiky delights. The passage follows a description of a group of servant children – ‘he’ is a young Black servant – taking the piss out of their masters and mistresses. It’s a kind of purposive fooling around that recalls the fun dances, which are also dangerous games, shared by the narrator and her friend Tracey in Swing Time (2016), or the goofing ...”