“... A total loser – no clue!’ Such a reputation takes a lot of preserving. Orwell, in short, may have become more important as a symbol than for anything he actually wrote. Both of these books seek to reverse that suspicion, one by tethering the symbol to some distinctly fallible human flesh, the other by subjecting Orwell’s political prose to the kind ...”

“... indirect style, but his slightly stagey horror at the likely excesses of the first-person mode may nonetheless strike a chord with readers of a variety of free-running or confessional forms, not just novels (think Christmas circular letters). But what about autobiography or memoir? Surely here self-revelation is of the essence. Yet James’s stricture ...”

“... while more beautiful, is decidedly less representative. The attempt to cope with this deprivation may account for some of the awkwardnesses in the installation. The felicitous parts tend to come in the galleries which consist of a single nine-metre-square module, such as those containing works on paper and the room presenting medium-sized paintings of ...”

“... George recorded. Some, of course, felt the same about Clarence. His intended consort was Princess May of Teck, a royal in a million, who it was hoped would pull him together. On his premature (and extremely fortunate) demise, she married Prince George instead. The rest of his life was a succession of such fantasy worlds. Both Alexandra and her daughter ...”

“... that none was as important as was once thought seems a curiously myopic way to proceed. Railways may not have been ‘indispensable’: but they were still, apparently, more important than any other single ‘factor’ mentioned in this book. The heroic events may not have been typical: but, as the cover eloquently ...”

“... and drunkenness are unlikely to be tolerated (how they will be policed is another matter). Beer may be the drug of choice at men’s football matches in Europe and Latin America, but having experienced the collective euphoria of watching England’s women winning the European Championships at Wembley this summer without encountering a single drunk or ...”

“... it the wealthiest club in the world, or at least the club with the wealthiest backers, which may not be the same thing. None of these teams has needed to move to follow the money. Instead, the money has come to them. What these new owners seem to want from English football is a stake in a glamorous and dynamic business with vast global appeal. This means ...”

“... individualism to an imperial appetite and the project of continental expansion. Turner’s insight may sound like common sense: once the last frontier has closed, Americans will have to teach themselves how to live, and at just that point the New World will cease to be new. But we have never come to that point, says Fisher. He is pretty sure we never will. And ...”

“... are commonly brought up to show that the modernist impetus survived in the generation after Pound: David Jones, Anglo-Welshman; Basil Bunting, Northumbrian Englishman; and Hugh MacDiarmid, Lowland Scot. The claim for Jones seems the weakest: it is advanced by Jones’s admirers, not by the poet himself, who took no interest in the question, having other fish ...”

“... quest for national self-determination; nor will Israelis concede that Zionism, however good it may have been for the Jews, has inflicted great suffering on the Arabs of Palestine and still continues to do so. Conversely, the Palestinians have so far been entirely unable to reconcile themselves to Zionism as a genuine movement of Jewish national ...”

“... the cannon and the firing-squad against the drawing-room and the kitchen stove. At the end of David Pownall’s book the protagonist and his confidant are shot. At the end of John Hearne’s the leading characters have been respectively drowned, decapitated and disembowelled, and the hero is about to be hanged. Ann Schlee’s story ends with her heroine ...”

“... adventures. Hollinghurst extended his range abroad, with much of the book set in Belgium, and may even have taken Baker’s reference to overemphasis on sex as a challenge, in his description of the climactic erotic encounter, when the narrator at last has his way with Luc, a 17-year-old he has been employed to tutor. It’s Luc who finally initiates the ...”

“... What have Margaret Thatcher and David Steel in common, apart from holding the leadership of their respective political parties? Both are highly intelligent and educated persons with academic qualifications – Thatcher in chemistry and law, Steel in arts and law. Both have been called to the bar, and for both politics has been the main preoccupation of their adult lives ...”

“... they were not tortured: they held very different beliefs about the supernatural. Confessions may be tainted by having been extracted through torture, but the verbatim record of interrogations can still tell us a good deal about the beliefs, and (as Lyndal Roper has shown) the psychic dramas, of the accused. Of the dozen books discussed here, Clark’s ...”

“... of the entrepreneurial spirit to the rise of literary criticism. And yet it sounds so curious. We may worry about imports, like Henry Ryecroft, but we don’t infer morality from butter. We may worry about war, like Lord Salisbury, but we don’t infer rivalry between nations from a Darwinian rivalry between species. Those ...”