“... 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 ...”

“... last years of his life. It was then given to the Benslow Music Trust which provides violins for young players.23 February. I love jokes and used to be fed them almost on a weekly basis by Barry Cryer, as one of his extensive and distinguished clientele that included Judi Dench and Andrew Marr. He would ring up and without ...”

“... Rania was always making cakes and bringing them in for the staff and she got to know the other young mothers. As well as befriending Naseem she was close to another mother from the tower, Munira, who lived on the fifth floor. It was a strong Muslim community: many were from the Middle East, but a sizeable number were from Morocco, and some of the local ...”

“... to give direction to the privatised industry. Morton commissioned a report from Atkins and Ernst & Young to assess whether there was a need for such a line. By the time they reported in 2003, Morton – who was too outspoken to occupy such a sensitive government post for long – had been replaced. Alistair Darling, the longest-serving New Labour transport ...”

“... Barham Salih, then deputy prime minister of Iraq, sat in the garden of his Baghdad villa while a young internet entrepreneur called Jack Dorsey tried to persuade him that he needed to be on Twitter. Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, was in Baghdad at the invitation of the State Department. Over the previous three days, he and eight other Silicon Valley ...”

“... If so, in what context? The physical context was a seminar for the Japanese equivalent of the Young Conservatives. Nakasone’s statements were clearly not meant for foreign ears. He probably didn’t mean to offend American blacks and Hispanics, although he obviously did, which showed a curious degree of insensitivity for a man who prides himself on ...”