“... space for any genre, any costume and any voice. You can make it a detective thriller, like John Lawton’s Riptide, set in London in 1941, featuring Sergeant Troy of the Yard. You can make it modern picaresque, a frenetic burst of lyrical futurist imagery, like Rodney Hall’s The Day We Had Hitler Home, which is ...”

“... by an ungainly country house, a cross between two seasoned favourites of Olden Times, Hardwick Hall and Burleigh, on which the pierced parapet spells out, instead of a heraldic motto, ‘a stitch in time saves nine’. Lancaster’s high points are the Greeks, the Gothic of Chartres, the Georgian terrace and the English Renaissance of Jones and Wren, which ...”

“... harmlessly away). Katharina’s case stalled until October 1616, when Einhorn sent a report to John Frederick, the duke of Württemberg, detailing the accusations against her, which now included hurting children. Ducal councillors ordered the governor to detain the suspect. But Katharina had already left Leonberg to be with her son in Linz. Katharina made ...”

“... when an unhealed wound remains? Not long before the vote, the point was cruelly rubbed in. John Howard’s Liberal-Coalition government made the unusual decision to invade its own country, by sending the Australian Defence Force into the Northern Territory. His aim was to deal decisively with concerns about child abuse and corruption among the mainly ...”

“... with their secretaries. I imagined there were sub-species of adultery going on, up and down John Dalton Street, Cross Street, Corn Exchange, but we never did matrimonial, or if we did the clerks locked the files away from me, so my most recent take on male duplicity came from the novels of Thomas Hardy. The 1960s were behind us, the era of free ...”

“... Late Georgian London had the best of both worlds. Haydon could show his Jerusalem in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, itself an exercise in a fantasy style inspired by Napoleon’s campaign. The crowd who came to see it included Mrs Siddons, whose imposing, if now ageing, figure haunts The Immortal Dinner. When she said that Haydon’s rendering of the face ...”

“... hyperreality in Baudrillard’s sense – something that is more real than real, a hall of mirrors in which the separation between the world and its representations dissolves? Or perhaps all of the above?The ‘rich confusion’ of American identity, as Baldwin put it, has given rise to endless attempts at definition, by foreign observers as ...”

“... the end came she was desperately sorry to be leaving him. Of the younger men coming to the fore, John Gollan, Pollitt’s successor – though the latter continued to dominate, she believes – was a likeable character; and George Matthews (still active today) seemed, as he did to everyone, a man full of ‘earnest honesty’. The Party set up in 1920 was ...”

“... a hundred years before Parliament paid out about five times that amount to the ‘lone genius’ John Harrison in 1773 for the magnificent marine chronometer that provided a working solution to the longitude problem. The patent Hooke wanted was a type of ‘Letters Patent’ – literally ‘open letters’, sealed but not sealed up, conferring the special ...”

“... wounded supporters (including Booth in The Poet’s Plight) are still contending against them. John Osborne (director of American Studies at Hull) attempted to refute those denigrating Larkin on ideological grounds in his 2008 Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence; his new book, Radical Larkin, fortified with literary theory, wishes to reclaim Larkin as a ...”

“... just one, but virtually two generations older, since between us lay those – the cohort of Stuart Hall or Raphael Samuel – who had co-founded the New Left, from beginnings in the Fifties rather than the Forties. His looks assisted the illusion, the handsome features at once melodramatically mobile and geologically deep-set, a landscape of wild scarp and ...”

“... at Bootham School may have provoked an immediate countervailing effect in a cynical repudiation of John Bright; but in Birmingham Town Hall on 12 May 1958, exactly one hundred years after Bright had spoken there, Taylor concluded his own speech to a CND meeting by echoing Bright’s words (and shed his own tears with his old ...”

“... armour-plated car to Addis Ababa for the twenty-minute drive from the airport to the conference hall where the summit of the Organisation of African Unity was to be held. Halfway along one of the city’s boulevards, gunmen leapt from the crowds lining the streets and opened fire. A block downhill, a truck filled with explosives burst through. Mubarak had ...”

“... Peninsula in Docklands back to Farringdon. The floor above the platforms will become the ticket hall; above that is the ‘retail floor’, to be filled by Pret A Mangers and tie-on-the-fly boutiques. On its top deck, the finished station will have a garden and a restaurant with a ‘spectacular timber lattice roof’, and to one side, a large pond is ...”

“... of Ottoline Morrell of the Midlands’), in whose undistinguished Victorian mansion, Hambleton Hall, he was recuperating from TB. At Hambleton there were house parties to which Mrs Cooper invited noted intellectuals and society figures, enabling Coward to observe at close quarters the manners and morals of the upper classes. Soden describes Hambleton as ...”