“... authorship must surely have been collective, the planning long-term and meticulous. The killing of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, or the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001, are the two major vortices into which conspiracy theorists have been sucked in our own time, generating ever more elaborate explanations and ...”

“... as if Russell Brand were to land the role of Hamlet. But composure was not Rosa’s métier. He took fright when the Chigi, butts of his satire, took over the papacy in 1655, sent his mistress and their son out of town, then cursed his own cowardice: ‘Am I the person who let himself believe that he was the foremost man ...”

“... choices available seem to be between different percentages of loss. It’s no surprise that Davis took nearly three years to translate Madame Bovary: some translations need as long as the book itself took to write, a few even longer. John Rutherford’s magisterial version of Leopoldo ...”

“... The idea that Smith didn’t develop is a dull one regardless of whether it’s true or false (as John Bayley pointed out: ‘She never needed to do anything so banal as to “develop”, for the spectrum of tone continuously present is amazingly wide’). Despite his earlier criticism of her interest in cats Larkin’s later review singled out ‘The Singing ...”

“... his children should be as unsystematic as possible. The schooling of the two first-born brothers took them in its initial seven years to a dozen different schools in New York and to as many tutors. After that, they were to enjoy the same variety of educational experience during five years’ wandering in England, France, Switzerland and Germany. James revels ...”

“... world’s most polluted cities, and the life they lead there is mean and desolate. Four million took part in the 87,000 protests recorded last year, mainly against illegal land seizures. In the vast showrooms of Armani and Ferrari, a new elite shops hard to prove that, as Deng declared, ‘to get rich is glorious.’ Once you’re there, the other ...”

“... view. And yet, for the next fifty years there were few reports on these seemingly uncharted lands. John Gunther’s bestselling 1949 memoir, Death Be Not Proud, about the death from cancer of his brilliant 17-year-old son, is a notable exception. Then, by the end of the 20th century, book-length accounts of illness were suddenly everywhere: more than thirty ...”

“... on the Democrats for congressional support. Elite leadership of the Republican Party collapsed. John McCain chose the shockingly unqualified Sarah Palin as a running mate in the 2008 election because she was hugely popular with the Republican base, who revelled in the outrage she triggered among liberals. Barack Obama’s victory in that election only ...”

“... Last autumn, at the award ceremony of the 1994 Turner Prize, Charles Saatchi took the podium at the Tate Gallery. It was a very rare public appearance by Britain’s leading private collector of contemporary art. His words were awaited with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate ...”

“... and Philistines who, unlike the Jews, were never deported. They remained in Palestine (which took its name from the Philistines) and their descendants formed, and still form, the core of the indigenous population. In the seventh century, the Muhammadan Arabs brought with them their government, their language and their religion, and a majority of the ...”

“... My Father Died for This, the remarkable book he has produced with his wife, Abigail Calata (they took it in turns to write different sections), he can offer only an imaginary reconstruction of the murders.* He pieces the story together from partial records, from conversations with people who had first-hand knowledge of the security apparatus, and from the ...”

“... hanging about urinals or showing my aged genitals to girls.’ It’s clear that sexual fantasies took literary form too, even before Maurice – though again we will never know what they were like. At the end of 1911 he notes: ‘Like writing erotic short stories, some of which may be good.’ He shows one to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, who is ...”

“... use. The water either remains altogether or comes out as innocent as it entered.’ Pills he took did not help, he wrote again, they brought ‘a species of abortive diarrhoea. That is I felt the most reiterated & most violent inclination to stool, without being able to effect anything save the passage of a little blood.’ He saw a doctor who ...”

“... Fisher’s book as New English Grammar, which was in fact the title of a work by the enterprising John Kirkby, who almost certainly plagiarised Fisher’s book for his own. It was Kirkby rather than Fisher who was long given the dubious honour of being the first grammarian to claim that indefinite nouns are referred to with the pronoun ‘he’. The true ...”

“... London in 1962. The first thing Martha did was show me a photograph of Tony as a baby, which she took out of her Freedom Pass wallet. Martha is eighty; when Tony died she was in her forties. ‘We knew that Tony’s job came with certain risks,’ Andy told me. ‘We’re not naive. Had he been killed in the line of duty, it would have been heartbreaking and ...”