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“... London. The place and time correspond with a particularly terrible missile strike on New Cross on 25 November 1944. The novel is a sort of counter-history, imagining that five of the children killed on that day escaped unharmed, and charting the lives that they might have gone on to lead. Although Spufford makes clear in his acknowledgments that the ...”

“... of every culture, to resort to the stock means of dealing with the problem: the use of simple cross-cultural parallels, the belief that if it were possible to find instances of cat massacres among some remote and ‘primitive’ people, then the mere fact of the similarity would both preserve the strangeness of the deed and provide an explanation for ...”

“... identify Kircher as a mystical historian and philologist – one who realised that he could not cross the abyss that separated the present from the past by reading texts and grubbing in ruins. And perhaps that realisation set him on a different path: the kind of swooping, dramatic ascent that brought other mystics to their union with the divine. If so, we ...”

“... the Soviet Jews were systematically hunted down and killed. There were plenty of observers – Red Cross, neutral businessmen, conscience-stricken Germans, Jews who escaped – who let the world know what was happening. The Polish underground, which had agents in Kiev or Zhitomir or elsewhere in the Ukraine, could quite easily report to London through friendly ...”

“... the conceptual possibility of crimeless war, and is this to be welcomed? Awkward ground to cross with any safety. As a sharer of my generation’s fate, settled one way or the other between 1939 and 1945, I have thought that the Nuremberg Trials and lesser assizes held in the wake of the Second World War were entirely necessary and even ...”

“... words win hands down. Their triumph seems to stem from a fierce and prior quarrel. Welchman cross-examines Morris Louis and Frank Stella and Anthony Caro as namers, and catches too much noise in them, as if he’d cracked the secret of Modernism’s purity – that it was really contaminated by a literariness it ...”

“... about to impale Theodore Landsmark, a well-dressed black attorney who’d had the misfortune to cross paths with the protesters. As Landsmark tries to dodge his attacker, a heavy-set white man appears to restrain him, readying him for martyrdom. In the bicentenary year of America’s independence, Forman’s photograph was a reminder that, despite ...”

“... lucky for the past six months – my job and Tucson are swell, Mackie has an awfully nice Red Cross job (so we’ve enough money), I live off post and get to play tennis, I like the people in my department, I’m even writing poems. My two subjects are: bombing Hamburg and bombing crews – I feel sympathetic and sorry for both of them. Jarrell wrote to ...”

“... or anything personal. Yet Liddell was a considerable man in every way. After winning the Military Cross in the First World War, as both his brothers did, he spent the entire period after 1919 in counter-intelligence. He and his eccentric wife, the Hon. Calypso Baring, formed the centre of a large dinner-party world in their Cheyne Walk house designed by ...”

“... of the most senior SACP members, made no mention of it during the five days that he spent under cross-examination. Although far more was made of Mandela’s five-hour speech, Sisulu’s performance was more remarkable. Held in isolation, unable to consult his comrades or his lawyers, surrounded by intimidating policemen and warders, hectored and pilloried ...”

“... see the Royal Family, from the formal studies to the candid shot. I was surprised to discover in Anthony Holden’s book how recent a development this is.* He quotes the Duke of Windsor: ‘I grew up before the age of the flash camera, when newspapers still employed large staffs of artists to depict the daily events with pen sketches ... Because our ...”

“... Something to hold onto, whose title would itself have been greeted with fellow-feeling by Bagshaw. Anthony Powell’s character is fascinated by things for their own sake, an attitude not common among either believers or men of action. Kermode’s sense of history, of the novels and poems of the Thirties, is of the same kind. He has a strong feeling for ...”

“... to do battle against her, but of the services of such invaluable allies as General Galtieri, Anthony Wedgwood Benn and ‘King Arthur’ Scargill? And was there anyone at Tory Central Office so absurdly optimistic as to foresee the hilarious shambles which would be made of itself by the so-called ‘Alliance’? Yet I wonder. Asquith’s long tenure as ...”

“... Lurie’s obituary of Mary McCarthy, Salman Rushdie on Graham Greene, Claire Tomalin on Coleridge, Anthony Burgess on Fielding, other reviews by Anita Brookner, Peter Conrad, Roy Foster and Hilary Mantel), and as the limits on the new paper’s resources became apparent I thought how hard it would be to put together pages of comparable stature. There was one ...”

“... project, it’s also one that stands on its own feet. An affinity with the fiction of Anthony Powell has been caught, but this is not a novel. It is not a memoir, though it eats the memoirs of others, plankton-fashion. It is a species of history – annals, perhaps. Kynaston’s far from copious political judgments are sensible and ...”