“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... writes in her introduction. Curtis had no doubt about his promise. When the pop producer Jonathan King staged a talent search, he went down to London and presented himself – no songs, no band, just himself. When he was 16 he gave Deborah a valentine which begins: ‘I wish I were a Warhol silk screen … ’ Why a silk screen? Why not Warhol himself? It’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... our understanding of power. At Berkeley he ran a seminar from which two other major books emerged: Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988), which explored the theme of carnality and spirituality, and Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), which offered a ...”

“... might occasionally sport his Nemean trophy in the theatre, but it is difficult to believe that Peter Quince and his assemblage of very amateur actors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream plausibly procured the real thing for Snug the joiner in the part of Lion. Bears were more plentiful in plays, especially for a few years after 1609 when, as we now know thanks ...”

“... The next, far more consequential, step is the genome editing of human embryos. As the geneticist Peter Visscher and bioethicist Julian Savulescu put it earlier this year in an article for Nature, genome editing has the potential to create ‘human phenotypes that have never been previously observed’. Stephen Hsu, founder of the embryo screening company ...”

“... the same eternity. She asked with my words. This is a Great Kingdom that is missing a queen or a king. And I, for a moment, for just a second, believed we were understanding each other.The novel’s sections cycle through the main characters. First, Rivera Garza as first-person narrator, from her discovery of the body through to her uneasy relationship with ...”

“... This process has enriched our recent fiction – most remarkably, perhaps, the novels of Peter Ackroyd, D.M. Thomas, Beryl Bainbridge, Julian Barnes and Thomas Keneally, whose Schindler’s Ark was marketed in America (under a slightly different title) as non-fiction and in Britain as a novel. Writers of light fiction, too, have added to the ...”

“... worse he was spiking his diatribes with personal insults against a much-loved primate, Jakob Peter Mynster, who had died the year before. Kierkegaard had, until then, always appeared to share in the general veneration for Bishop Mynster. But now that Mynster was dead, and magnificently buried following a ceremony across the road in the Church of Our ...”