“... books? What kind of existence do they have? In Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (1998), Anne Lake Prescott calls his fictive titles ‘nonbooks’ or ‘promises of books’: ‘oscillating between being and nonbeing’, she writes, they are ‘the librarian’s equivalent of negative wonder’. Imaginary books come close to being real, but then ...”

“... and as affecting as anything in The Best Years of Our Lives, a test case for the younger Clift’s power to move us. Responding to an act of arbitrary unfairness, Prewitt has given up a place in a bugle company in order to become a simple infantryman. His best friend, Maggio, played by an impishly wiry Frank Sinatra, has just died as a consequence of the ...”

“... surgery, so that Jay Gatsby receives the looks first of Robert Redford then Leonardo DiCaprio. Anne Hathaway’s blandly pretty mask is tied with cinematic ribbon over Jane Austen’s blurry features – a criminal defacement however photogenic the impostor. Traffic the other way, taking cinema as the basis for fiction, tends to focus on headline-grabbing ...”

“... the Worshipful Company of Stationers, a prestigious body in decline, which had lost its monopoly power; nor was he ever a member of any of the ‘congers’, the more or less stable consortia of leading booksellers who would pool resources in major ventures. They were called congers, a contemporary alleged, because ‘as a large conger eel is said to devour ...”

“... way Karl Liebknecht ended up, ‘murdered in prison alongside Rosa Luxemburg after their bid for power failed in 1919’. But Mark seems so pathetic, his understanding of what he’s doing so slight that the comparison makes him ridiculous. Each time I read the novel, I put it down at this point: I couldn’t stomach any more whiny men, and I couldn’t see ...”

“... or indignant humour’. In 1978 Cecil Beaton attributes to the society philanthropist Lady Anne Tree ‘an oversize personality and character – rorty, Hogarthian and with exquisite understanding of character’, and in 2003 a writer in the Economist evokes a ‘Hogarthian throng of cheerful tradesmen and naughty ’prentice boys’. ‘March of the ...”

“... inertia prevailed. Now, with the politicians themselves running gagging down the corridors of power, the obstacles rapidly disappeared. The Thames Purification Bill was introduced on 15 July and swiftly passed into law on 2 August, the last day of the session. Thus 1858 was fated to be famous in British history principally for the Great Stink, as it was ...”

“... truth, whereas Chaucer, like Ovid, ‘suggests that when people believe in one truth, sovereign power and unchallengeable discourse … other people tend to get damaged, even killed’. Having seen the tyranny of the Visconti dynasty first-hand, he may have been appalled (as Boccaccio was) by Petrarch’s willing service to the lords of Milan. But he had ...”

“... gradually I fell out of love with him. I went on loving him, however.Danny Moynihan, the son of Anne Dunn, one of Lucian’s lovers, was at the Slade with me. He arranged a show for some of us at Acquavella Galleries in New York in 1981. The work was at the Moynihans’ house, waiting to be shipped to the US, when, according to Dunn, ‘Lucian came ...”

“... the process of European integration is now confronted with the potential emergence of a hegemonic power, with a widely asymmetrical capacity to affect all other member states. The third great change has followed from the end of Communism in the countries of the former Warsaw Pact. The restoration of capitalism east of the Elbe has further transformed the ...”

“... Knights stresses that ideas of fiduciary public trust were first advanced by critics of royal power during the Civil War. These men talked of a public good: the ideal office-holder should be impartial, selfless and accountable; any corruption or venality was a ‘breach of trust’. They drew up a ‘black list’ of MPs who had accepted offices and ...”

“... animist tenderness in Hughes’s writing, a tenderness that plays against his celebration of feral power. It’s like the last line of a short early poem ‘Snowdrop’ – ‘Her pale head heavy as metal’ – where nature and human artifice come gently together.Inevitably, though, it is biographical interest that these letters stimulate. We catch Hughes’s ...”

“... those suspected of recusancy to swear loyalty to the sovereign, and to disavow papal claims to power as ‘impious and heretical’: ‘And I do further swear, that I do from my heart abhor, detest and abjure, as impious and heretical, this damnable doctrine and position, that princes which be excommunicated or deprived by the pope, may be deposed or ...”

“... that they overlook its obvious concomitants in keeping down the standard of wages and purchasing power, and the spread of desolation over their own countryside. Their eyes only seem to be fixed on overseas trade.There are those who argue that it was this depression – and the sense of betrayal it engendered in farmers between the wars – that led the ...”

“... are properly a function of medical ethics rather than law, it is the law which holds the ultimate power to determine where the territory of medical ethics ends and the realm of the insured risk begins. The difference in levels at which medical negligence can occur, as the book’s opening chapter explains, is of key relevance. Once an individual is qualified ...”