“... his collateral descendant Oliver (also no slouch at creating ruins). Amid much that is familiar, James Clark’s absorbing and formidable study presents much that is refreshingly new, as might be expected after a lifetime of scholarly work on late medieval English monastic life. Clark corrects the common impression that monasteries in their last 150 years of ...”

“... help of the European powers, which later provided a Bavarian teenager as the country’s first king (the Greek parliament sits in what was his palace); Greece’s first political parties were aligned with English, Russian and French interests. After the Second World War, the US ensured that Greece wouldn’t fall under Soviet influence by enlisting it as a ...”

“... Ghosn is clearly in his element. And just in case anyone doubts it, a dancer dressed as the Sun King himself in plumed Apollo outfit takes up position behind Ghosn at the centre of the table, bowing to his latter-day avatar with an elaborate flourish. What need for anyone else from the alliance, you can almost hear Ghosn thinking. L’alliance c’est ...”

“... make common cause with the green welly brigade. Where can the royalist papers go, when the future king has made it clear he thinks GM stinks? Whither the papers that once held to the idea of progress on behalf of all mankind, and science addressing the world’s problems, when biology has been privatised? None of these books is British or about Britain, but ...”

“... personal identification which disavow personality. Take, for instance, a poem from the collection King Log (1968), subtitled ‘A Valediction to Osip Mandelstam’, and entitled ‘Tristia: 1891-1938’. It is quoted in full: Difficult friend, I would have preferred You to them. The dead keep their sealed lives And again I am too late. Too late The ...”

“... undiscovered Southern continent – really existed; if it did, to take possession in the name of King George III; and if it didn’t, to plant the flag on whatever still unknown lands were encountered in the circumnavigation.The Royal Society would organise the astronomy, securing a grant from the king to pay for it; the ...”

“... piles, pox and plague. Harington’s great innovation in domestic hygiene was so successful that James I is supposed to have brought him in as a troubleshooter to deal with the privies at Theobalds and Hampton Court. Harington was much more than a hygienist, however. Indeed, most of his works try to achieve rather too much at once. The Metamorphosis of Ajax ...”

“... predecessor is lost – the first ever detective story or civilised thriller. The drama critic James Agate, who once savagely described Donald Wolfit’s Hamlet as a private detective watching the jewels at the Claudius-Gertrude wedding feast, may have said more than he knew. Yet to praise Hamlet as the first detective story makes sense mainly in terms of ...”

“... James Thurber’s best-known cartoon has an impassive little man introducing his spouse to a dazed friend with ‘That’s My First Wife Up There, and This Is the Present Mrs Harris.’ The first Mrs Harris seems to be crouched on all fours on the top of a very high (glazed) bookcase, just behind the second Mrs Harris ...”

“... when the search for Franklin began, and 1859, when M’Clintock discovered some grisly remains on King William Island, almost thirty naval and overland expeditions joined the search. A writer has to juggle the names of explorers, famous in their day, but now known only to Arctic buffs, such as John and James Clark ...”

“... had been like. I said I wanted to go up to the Fairy Ring. For I’d had the fairy stories of James Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd read to me and he’d written of this wood, where it was dangerous to go most of the time, and especially to the Fairy Ring. The toadstools, a pale, hideous necklace of poison round the thick, mossy neck of the Ring, had been ...”

“... good novel of the great age of American paranoia, the age that began just before the Kennedy/King assassinations, and faded away somewhere in the early Nineties. It’s not that the Forties and Fifties didn’t have their paranoias, or that we are short of paranoids now. It’s that people didn’t always believe, and don’t have to believe, that what ...”

“... found the core of his talent. It all started with a spirited exchange in print with Henry James. In September 1884, when Stevenson was new to that oasis of convalescents, he picked up a copy of Longman’s Magazine, which carried James’s essay ‘The Art of Fiction’. He knew ...”

“... prose enters a realm of stealthy double-entendre which recalls the hint-filled atmosphere of Henry James – or rather, given the horror of much of what happens later, the atmosphere of a Stephen King who has learned to write like Henry James. ‘It had always been certain to start like ...”

“... Rider Haggard were responsible for his lifelong interest in Africa. But for most children today, James Stephen’s prophecy of a time when ‘The Rudyards cease from kipling, and the Haggards ride no more’ has now come true. If these older historical novels are no longer read, is a new generation of writers getting over an equally vivid sense of the ...”