“... she remained in Florence when he went into exile in 1302. We know too that when their daughter Antonia took the veil, she became Suor Beatrice.By any standards but his own, Dante scarcely knew his beloved. His poetic ‘autobiography’, the Vita Nuova, can’t be taken at face value but claims that he and Beatrice met as children, not quite nine years ...”

“... the territory the maps show, some probably leaking, but no one is monitoring them. Darryl, a big white-haired guy with a Southern accent and a slight Santa affect, showed me another map, an aerial photograph of a portion of the Louisiana coast, on which you could see all the channels the oil and gas industry has cut through the wetlands, creating straight ...”

“... with the long, blond plaits; bride with the ‘splash of red carnations on the bodice of her white wedding gown’; in dinner jacket and monacle; pregnant, looking like ‘a rat dragging a stolen egg’. And so on. But she gives the impression of telling all, in a literary form unclassifiable except as a version of what television has accustomed us to ...”

“... responded by sending in an astonishing £25,000.’ There were messages of endorsement from Lady Antonia Fraser and the feisty historian Andrew Roberts; the Economist saluted the new edition as ‘impeccably postmodern’; 5000 free copies were distributed to schools, a Trojan horse for early indoctrination in traditional values that would be reinforced by ...”

“... wrote to Keane that the earl of Longford, Thomas Pakenham (Anglo-Irish historian and brother of Antonia Fraser), ‘is dying to meet you. He has been reading all your old novels under the impression that you are J.G. Farrell’s mother. In any case he thinks they are very good.’ She was not related to J.G. Farrell, who had won the Booker in 1973 with The ...”

“... cures gives us a stew made from the exploded hearts of terrified rabbits, as well as stringy white noodles that are actually strands of semen gathered from ‘a certain parasite of freshwater fish’. And yet, the peripety, when it comes, is gentle. Thilo, the dying art historian, shows Wojnicz a 16th-century Flemish painting, Landscape with the Offering ...”