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“... they do feel they know is that their subjects – the industrially injured with callouses like king-size buboes, the salt of the earth and their pneumoconiosis, the proud forklift drivers and the loyal company of chamfering machine operators – are pleased to stand to deferential attention for hours no matter what the weather and are proud to be just ...”

“... Winter’s Tale and Cinderella, there are described performances of Wilde’s Salome, Barrie’s Peter Pan, Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, at least three separate versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and two plays written by Olive Wellwood and staged by August Steyning, The Fairy Castle and Tom Underground.) Even her characters’ thought moves in stately ...”

“... a long sequence of racially aggravated land grabs ending in the 1670s with the decisive trauma of King Philip’s War. Prisoners were enslaved, though Africans were thought to be better workers and were available in bulk. New Englanders were not avid slaveowners, but they supplied the horses, timber and food that allowed Caribbean plantations to specialise in ...”

“... triumphs are those of 1945, 1964 and 1997; neither has found any inspiration in 1924 or 1929. Peter Clark and David Torrance both set out to reassert the political importance of the 1924 government and to restore the place of its senior figures in the history of the Labour Party. Both focus on high politics, and in particular the way the members of the ...”

“... reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third ...”

“... British authorities to the New York Times called a terrorist campaign. In 1946 they blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people, British, Arab and Jewish, and in 1948 they massacred the villagers of Deir Yassin. In between those two events, in 1947, the Irgun captured two British sergeants, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, both National ...”

“... of the play and then to finish on a spectacular death: roles like Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and, above all, Macbeth. Given his long-nourished Anglophobia and the seemingly inevitable collision with Macready which remains the most celebrated event of his career, it may seem odd that Forrest was prepared to stake so much of his reputation on the ...”

“... went out of their way to be nice to him, he would assume that he was being patronised. Cecil King subsidised him with a secret retainer from the Daily Mirror: his response was to bite the hand that was feeding him, and insult his benefactor’s wife. The simple and unalterable truth is that, whatever the cause of his difficulties, you just couldn’t get ...”

“... her third adult novel’. Other sources suggest it is her fourth, the first (Farewell Great King) having come out in 1972. This would mean that she has published more adult fiction than any of the other shortlisted contenders. Walsh has said that she turned to adult fiction in a serious way in the Eighties, as her children grew up. Green Bay ...”

“... is at least not obvious that the proposition ‘If Queen Victoria thought Prince Albert handsome, King George V collected postage stamps’ expresses a causal truth entirely on its own. I have to say that I disagree with Honderich not only on this point but over almost every opinion that I have so far attributed to him. To begin with, I see no need for the ...”

“... he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Research Fellowship to help him prepare a new edition of King Lear, a task at which he worked ferociously at first but never managed to complete. In the main, though, the Forties were for Berryman a decade of money struggles and career setbacks. These were also the years in which he began to manifest symptoms of the ...”

“... in a cave somewhere, waiting for a moment of national crisis to emerge and rescue his people, like King Arthur, Frederick Barbarossa or Owain Glyndwr. It’s easy to see why his medievalism drew him to the East, and to the Bedouin Arabs in particular. They lived sparely, healthily, openly. By contrast, modern England was ‘fat – obese’, and so green that ...”

“... had very bbbad luck with your weather, Mr Piper.’ Apocryphal or not, the remark stuck. Trust the king to get it wrong: Mr Piper couldn’t have had better weather; he had made it so. His stormclouds over the Round Tower are as darkly fatty as British Restaurant oxtail soup. A touch of excess came naturally to him; he warmed to the worn pinnacle and the ...”

“... cultured English cardinal in exile, Reginald Pole, who had a better claim than Henry VIII to be king of England, became a – not uncritical – admirer of the ambiguous Spaniard. In the 1530s, it looked as if Valdesianism might shape the future of the Western Latin Church. That it did not was largely thanks to the institution that is the main focus of ...”

“... and he was satisfied’ is how she describes a man with a prostitute. But readers admired the King James cadences: this was what great literature was supposed to sound like. Spurling, like some of Buck’s other biographers, charitably suggests that she first thought through her books in Chinese, translating as she went along; what sounds biblical is ...”