“... will already know that Lincoln has four more years to live before he is shot by Herold’s friend, John Wilkes Booth, the most notorious of all those Americans who have sought to win fame by killing heroes and idols. In this urgent manner, blending the legendary and the humdrum, Gore Vidal introduces his story, like a 20th-century version of a Greek tragedy ...”

“... to practise my newly acquired skill. My parents were both readers and Dad took the periodical John Bull, the books they generally favoured literature of escape, tales of ordinary folk like themselves who had thrown it all up for a life of mild adventure, a smallholding on the Wolds, say, or an island sanctuary, with both of them fans of the naturalist ...”

“... distance from the ‘mountains of Ararat’, the biblical resting place of Noah’s Ark, a 510-foot-long wooden structure rises from a ridge. The Ark Encounter – less than an hour’s drive from Cincinnati International Airport and within a day’s drive of much of the Bible Belt – is an attempt to recreate Noah’s ark from the account in Genesis. A ...”

“... about. Yesterday’s bourgeois media correspondent becomes today’s revolutionary press officer. John Reed was not the first or the last journalist to follow this trajectory. But he remains the most spectacular. He went to report Russia after the February Revolution in 1917, made straight for the Petrograd Bolsheviks and became a denizen of the seething ...”

“... most of whom she quickly established a remarkably lively and gossipy relationship. Diana Athill, John Guest, Terence Kilmartin, and many others, were recipients of chat, grumbles, doubts, jokes, questions, japes – often with cross-references to each other: if one editor disapproved of a new poem, she told you, and shot it in your direction, thus giving you ...”

“... to see whether there might be a psychological basis for Buchan’s continual stomach trouble (like John S. Blenkiron, he had an untrustworthy duodenum), the sage pronounced: ‘Never in my experience have I met anybody less frustrated or less crippled by inhibitions. He is free from neuroses.’ There is a touch of the inhuman here, and the impression is ...”

“... a few unrighteous men (contrary to the deluge),’ Pope, who lost money himself, was to write. John Gay was ruined, and in a letter written weeks after prices crashed, explains that he can’t settle his book-buying bill ‘at a time when it is impractible to sell out of the Stocks in which my fortune is engag’d’. How Tonson must have chuckled. He ...”

“... John Enoch Powell was an eminent classical scholar, as his entry in Who’s Who proclaimed: Craven Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1931; First Chancellor’s Classical Medallist; Porson Prizeman; Browne Medallist, 1932; fellow of Trinity, 1934-38; professor of Greek at the University of Sydney, 1937-39. He was 25 when he was appointed to the chair at Sydney ...”

“... part-Spanish friend is often ‘black’ if there is a hint of Africa in his or her make-up. John Bellew, the husband of Clare Kendry in Nella Larsen’s exquisite novel Passing (1929), responds violently when he finds out that Clare, who has cheeks of ‘ivory’ and hair the colour of ‘pale gold’, is ‘black’. All those years, ...”

“... at the end of the 14th century, set his son up as a lawyer. The lawyer bought land, and his son John inherited more, including Caister Castle, from his wife’s cousin, Sir John Fastolf. The Pastons always married well. They fought to maintain the Fastolf inheritance – in the courts against competing claimants but also ...”

“... feels a certain amount of foreboding, wondering ‘what sort of “beasts” required a seven-foot-high electric fence’. The Restraint of Beasts cheerfully exploits literary conventions lifted from Kafka, Beckett and Pinter. There is much terse dialogue loaded with menace: Donald subtly adjusts the heating and lighting in his office according to the ...”

“... values his privacy, which in an age of universal press vulgarity seems refreshingly unusual. His foot has never been in anyone’s front door. Technically, he writes cleanly and well, although his column occasionally suffers from a touch of the Oliver Pritchetts – that is, an addiction to whimsy which can be tiresome. But he has a light touch, and is ...”

“... you out of this fantasy is the first line of dialogue, delivered matter-of-factly by the farmer, John, to his wife: ‘Mary? I’ll ask you again. How many times did you come?’ This isn’t your average farm but a site of adultery, fecklessness, vice. This is a Kevin Barry short story because it could only be a Kevin Barry short story. There Are Little ...”

“... seem a reasonable wager, to bet your safety against the promise of beauty.At the very top, at the foot of the chimney, we decided it was high enough to risk noise. The air is sharper and colder up high. We played music, and danced a bit. Climbing the chimneys is a different enterprise; there are iron rungs set in the brick, like a ladder, but they are flush ...”

“... chic (the ready-dressed blue and silver faux-fir). For the unsure, there are ‘treetorials’ at John Lewis or ‘Christmas design consultation’ for £250. They’ll even decorate your tree for you. Most companies are cleverer with their own displays now, and recognise the opportunity for spectacle. You don’t even need the tree – just a surprising ...”