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“... at that date, which typically included modern imitations as well as ancient specimens. Farnborough Hill, for example, adapted for the widowed and exiled Empress Eugénie by Hippolyte Destailleur in 1880, and the subject of Anthony Geraghty’s recent study (Paul Holberton, £40), is a case in point. Unlike the remarkable ...”

“... the material for half a dozen novels into a single one of three or occasionally six hundred pages. Paul Bailey was the immaculate mistake of his title, born in Battersea in 1937, the third and unintended child of a roadsweeper and a domestic help. ‘Unintended’ hence a mistake, ‘immaculate’ because that was a word often on his mother’s lips. The ...”

“... and skirts that could be worn in different combinations); trousers; and, the great couturier Paul Poiret’s stroke of genius, a dress that a woman could put on without assistance. This discrepancy between women’s experience and men’s may be one reason why dress has come to be seen as a predominantly female subject, or at least one that is expressed ...”

“... to their deserts, whether these be good or bad’. The resurrection of the body, derived from St Paul, is still part of Catholic doctrine, though it has always posed problems. Will the resurrected bear the marks of whatever illness or injury killed them? What about widows who remarried? Will some people be older than their parents? There were always ...”

“... the road to Abriachan better on the map than on the ground. I can trace it back and forth up the hill as it rises above the old graveyard at Killianan, through the hazel woods, out to the open ground by Balchraggan, past the Balbeg mill that belonged, my father told me, to his great-grandfather. Abriachan is the place of my father’s people, a district of ...”

“... afterwards, MacGregor left the Department of Transport to become a director of the merchant bank Hill Samuel, which, while he had been Secretary of State, advised British Rail on the Channel Tunnel. (MacGregor has now been sacked in a cull of jobs at Hill Samuel, and we must wait for next year’s accounts to know the ...”

“... which they want to spend on doing good. But social policy? It is probably unfair to cite Michael Hill’s Understanding Social Policy as an example of why the subject is so likely to produce a yawn. But he manages throughout to reduce subjects of considerable interest to many individuals to a flat, uninteresting, not to say bureaucratic level. His book has ...”

“... the books that fell by the wayside have recently been reissued by the British Library. The Notting Hill Mystery, advertised as ‘the first detective novel’, was published in 1862, six years before The Moonstone, which T.S. Eliot, not altogether correctly, called ‘the first, the longest and the best’ of detective novels. The Female Detective, a ...”

“... and Scottish father in Eastbourne in May 1940 and raised in Balham in South London. She married Paul Carter in 1960 when she was just twenty, then moved with her husband to Bristol, where she wrote four novels in quick succession and started publishing her journalism in New Society magazine. Her third novel won a travel award of £500, which Carter used to ...”

“... for the death of a Fascist demagogue’. In the pair of designs created by Jean-Charles Moreux and Paul Vera in the early Thirties for Jacques Rouche the layout côté cour is a demi-swastika and côté jardin a thunder flash. Both are used quite innocently of course, but it is worth noting how thoroughly (and how much more than we now care to remember) Nazism ...”

“... detectable before 1914, were suddenly fanned into life. The greatest of the prewar couturiers, Paul Poiret, had predicted that by 1958 women would be wearing trousers. In fact they were wearing them by the 1920s, both literally and figuratively. French couture between the wars was dominated, as never before or since, by female designers: Jeanne ...”

“... London and surrounded by the first terraced houses. On one side of it he built the church of St Paul. It was built, Jones explained, in the Tuscan style, a plain and massive ur-style with overhanging eaves. It was a kind of manifesto, a demonstration of Jones’s need to give architecture a foundation myth and bolster its intellectual and social ...”

“... diagrammatic binarism. One need only compare the genuine speed and unreeling vertiginousness of Paul Muldoon’s sort-of-sonnet sequence ‘The more a man has the more a man wants’ to realise how lacking Murray is in poetic, as opposed to narrative momentum. In Muldoon, the plot seems an invention in which he might learn what he thinks, and the reader is ...”

“... Lawrence Stone guided my first steps into the maze of Anglo-American historiography; Christopher Hill accompanied, a long time ago now, the infant squawks of my early Marxism, which today is much eroded. Though if I still preserve some traces of my belief in that doctrine, I owe it to the high abilities of such ci-devant Marxist historians as ...”

“... and themes which will make enough noise to fill up the silence of the great open spaces. Paul Auster’s Moon Palace is a ‘Western’ novel executed with consummate skill and an unerring feeling for the volume control. His epigraph, from Jules Verne – ‘Nothing can astound an American’ – prepares us for the layers of romantic irony ...”