“... he seemed to belong in American football or body-building. This was no coincidence, because we now know that, like many of the practitioners of those sports, McGwire had achieved his unusual shape by taking steroids. It is not simply hindsight to say that many people suspected as much at the time. It’s just that not many of them cared. At one point ...”

“... anoth er Nigerian, Kole Omotoso – Achebe or Soyinka? – which is bound to remind the read er of George Steiner’s Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? After four decades of labour, there are some twenty books, including novels, short stories, children’s fiction, poetry and essays; Achebe has also edited literary journals and anthologies, and still found the time to ...”

“... largest forced exile of citizens at the behest of a European government in pre-modern history’; we may compare it with the uprootings of peoples by Assyrian or Mongol conquerors. His book is massively researched, with the fullest use of official papers, but with the greatest weight attached to the convicts’ own testimony, surviving in ...”

“... The much gossiped about George Eliot absolutely hated the idea of people talking behind their hands. The year she took up with a married man was also the year Ruskin’s wife revealed her husband’s impotence during court proceedings. ‘Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it,’ Eliot wrote ironically in Daniel Deronda ...”

“... In one of George Eliot’s Scenes from Clerical Life a lady addicted to reading tracts skims rapidly over references to Zion or the River of Life, but has her attention immediately caught by any mention of ‘pony’ or ‘boots and shoes’. A reader of modern biographies can see why. The best things in them are usually the facts, the objects, the unexplained and inexplicable things that cluttered up the lives of the august and famous, as they do everybody else’s, and now find a place in the story ...”

“... In 1953, he’d founded the Paris Review in part as a front for that work, a detail he kept from George Plimpton for years. His third novel, Raditzer (1961), depicts yet another young man of means resisting paternal influence: Charles Stark foregoes joining his father’s law firm to enlist in the navy just as the war is ending. Shipping out to the ...”

“... and was secretary of war under Taft, Roosevelt and Truman. Like his cousin (and both Presidents Bush) Loomis went to Andover and Yale, later moving on to Harvard Law School. He started his legal career as a clerk in Stimson’s New York law firm, subsequently acting as his cousin’s financial adviser, making him even richer through excellent stock-market ...”

“... In his history of the genre, Brian Aldiss suggests that most SF is what he calls ‘prodromic’: we must read it less as a prophecy of the future than as symptomatic of the present. By this rule 1984 will be 36 years out of date when we get there. A commoner view (on which Aldiss is naturally not so keen) holds that SF, like the Western, is an exclusively American line of fiction in which dabbling Europeans can easily make fools of themselves ...”

“... illegal aliens’ was to be constructed at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay. ‘We’re going to send them to Guantánamo,’ he said. ‘It’s a tough place to get out.’ The first ten ‘high-threat illegal aliens’ arrived a few days later, in early February. Two hundred or so more followed. But by 13 March, they had all been sent back ...”

“... Sophie Blind, begins the novel dead, or so she tells us: she was decapitated by a car on Avenue George V in Paris, coming out of the hairdresser’s. It’s a comic death and the tone is deadpan. ‘It’s quite certain I am dead. It’s in the newspaper.’ Sophie could get used to her new situation. She spent her life preoccupied with being happy: ‘Now ...”

“... no paltry revelation of lousy morals among the morality-preaching classes. It was, at least until we learned of the Iran-Contra business, the most systematic attempt to convert the United States from a democratic republic into a junta with a civilian façade. Since it takes the part for the whole, and summarises the whole tapestry by the single thread by ...”

“... understand the nature of the conflict they are fighting. Britain never did understand, and now we would rather not think about it. The troops are home from a campaign that lasted 13 years, including Iraq in the middle. They are coming home from their bases in Germany, too. The many car parks’ worth of mine-proof vehicles you can see from Battlesbury ...”

“... 12th-century exchequer. Next, after four centuries of inflation – job-title inflation anyway – we find the post of treasurer ennobled as lord treasurer or puffed up as far as lord high treasurer. In the 17th century, the office was put into commission, first in an ad hoc way and then permanently. Thus heroic social-climbing was succeeded by backstairs ...”

“... discovered the shattered, melted wreckage resting on and around a vast termite mound in the bush, there was only one survivor: the American chief security officer and Korean War veteran, Sergeant Harold Julian. The remaining crew and passengers on the Albertina perished in the fireball that consumed the DC-6 when it hit the ground and broke ...”

“... blend of fashion, art, commerce and academic analysis that marks the current cultural scene. How we dress now is a subject that engages semioticians, social historians, political analysts and gender theorists – ‘fashion civilians’, in the words of Colette’s biographer Judith Thurman – as well as superstar designers, magazine editors, high-spending ...”