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“... those who write or speak recklessly.An echo of the aesthetic defence of Rushdie could be heard in Ian McEwan’s retrospective comment on the affair in the Guardian on 14 September 2012: ‘it seemed like the social glue of multiculturalism was melting away. We were coming apart, and doing it over a postmodern multi-layered satirical novel.’ What work is ...”

“... flash and sizzle.’ Bellow is not one of those purely imaginative writers like Golding or Ian McEwan who invent copiously and logically from first premises. You cannot imagine him wondering what it is like to be an ape married to a young woman writer who is having trouble with her second novel after the success of the first. Or wondering what might ...”

“... digital effects like Gladiator’s, only more so. It has a proper cast, with proper stars in it: Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, Liv Tyler as Arwen Undómiel (the women’s parts have been beefed up somewhat). An acquaintance e-mailed to say he’d seen an early trailer in a cinema. He was so moved by the glorious sight, he cried.On the ...”

“... Bothwell and cousin of James VI, who was accused of trying to encompass the death of the King by black magic. Bothwell fled to England, returned with a small raiding party, negotiated with both the Duke of Parma and Elizabeth and may have been implicated in the affair of the Scottish Blanks, a plan for a number of Scottish nobles to rise for the Spaniards ...”

“... in London slums – ‘sinister courts where the police hesitated to penetrate, but where your black bag protected you from harm’ – to write Liza of Lambeth (1897), ‘a very clever realistic study of factory girl and coster life’, as his publisher’s reader put it. Further novels and a Spanish travel book followed, but they didn’t make much money ...”

“... by her as her only escape – or, as with Myra Hindley, an evil, compelling ‘mad’ genius, Ian Brady, virtually taking over her soul by making her do the most unimaginable harm to innocent children. Women’s crimes or even misdemeanours go to the very spot where the meaning and value of ‘woman’ balances the murderous testosterone of masculinity ...”

“... of European civilisation could more readily be invoked. Rebecca West’s massive and idiosyncratic Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, an emotive cry for the Serbs as the Wehrmacht swept through Yugoslavia, belongs in this tradition. Its greatest representative, however, was the elder Seton-Watson, who not only wrote the first modern histories in English of the ...”

“... in common traditions or public institutions, it looks in established retrospect like a temporary black-out in the growth of the national psyche. Our only republic remains under ban, a historical freak. Rosebery could raise a statue to Cromwell outside Parliament: eighty years later, Benn could not even get him onto a postage-stamp, at a time when Rosa ...”

“... in comics sixty years or so ago and called, I think, a Seebackroscope. It was a small funnel in black Bakelite containing a tilted mirror about the size of a sixpence; this device you were meant to hold to your eye or screw into your eye socket in order to check that you weren’t being followed. It was intended, presumably, as part of the equipment of the ...”

“... V8 Land Rover, lightly armoured – which would travel the road out of Amara in the dark. Sergeant Ian Blackett was in the patrol’s first vehicle and had known Wakefield for five months. There were 14 men in the patrol and Wakefield was one of the most experienced. ‘He was a professional soldier,’ Blackett says. Some soldiers seem not to do much except ...”

“... includes more of the poems that contributed to his early reputation. He remarked in a letter to Ian Parsons, who was to publish his first books, that ‘there is a rather portentous air about compact poems without notes, like a seduction without conversation,’ and of course he wrote notes fairly freely, though claiming to believe that what made them ...”

“... to make the theft secure’. Not that this does him any good: Ungrateful man! But vain thy black design, Th’attempt, and not the deed, thy hand defiled; Preserved by his own charms and spells divine, Safely the gentle Shakespeare slept and smiled. Shakespeare remains untouchable, serenely away with the fairies, an outcome rigged from the start: the ...”

“... Sons: The Story of Iran’s Boy Soldiers, written shortly after the end of the war by a Briton, Ian Brown. I was struck by one account, a basiji’s recollection of his baptism of fire, at the age of 13. After only a month’s training at a camp near Khorramshahr I was sent to the front. When we arrived we all assembled in a field where there must have ...”

“... way down to the beach, where an old ship lay rusted on the rocks. Out in the wilds, death is the black backing on the mirror that allows you to see anything at all.That night Seamus took the country temper back to the city, talking, in company with Marie and us and a lamb stew and a bottle of Montrachet, of Robert Lowell the week before he died. ‘It’s ...”