“... vast readership once he left the scene, but here too things didn’t work out as planned. In 1967, Robert Hill, an editor at Pope’s American publisher, J.B. Lippincott, decided to give another writer he’d spotted a chance to fill the gap in the market. He wrote to Patrick O’Brian, who duly signed a contract headed: ‘Untitled novel about an 18th-century ...”

“... Literary imagination here reconfigures the territory by reviving memories of this site or that. Robert Macfarlane has pointed out that the verb ‘to write’ refers, via the old English Writan, to a kind of incisive track-making. Thus one would originally ‘write’ by drawing a point across a surface of wood, stone or earth: by furrowing a track. In ...”

“... history, and its politics are not what you might expect. Last time I was in Colombia I carried Robert Dahl’s Democracy and its Critics: a great help in listing questions about this old and battered democracy, if democracy is what the answers to his questions prove it to be.* ‘Old’? Competitive elections have been held in Colombia, on and off, at ...”

“... indications that Lukács had the slightest notion of military matters. In an outfit of plus-fours, green stockings and heavy walking shoes he visited the trenches of the Red Army’s fifth division (which, as Kadarkay explains, was defending the Hungarian frontier against Czech troops), and addressed the lice-ridden ‘Budapest Red Army’ troops:   The ...”

“... other but with all of it ultimately deadening. The story appeared in 1960 in Kenyon Review, where Robert Lowell would very likely have seen it, and where he would, I suspect, have found the penultimate line of his poem ‘The Flaw’, addressed to a woman lying beside him: ‘Dear Figure curving like a question mark’. Callisto’s girlfriend ‘lay like a ...”

“... script realised in film, the skiing drama Downhill Racer, directed by Michael Ritchie and starring Robert Redford. Solo Faces is the story of a rock-climbing drifter and his friend and rival and their pursuit of glory through heroic feats on the mountain. In the earlier A Sport and a Pastime, the quarry, the struggled for peak, is perfect sexual love, though ...”

“... a large bulbous structure that contains its vital organs, including three hearts which pump blue-green blood. A tubular siphon is attached to the mantle, which the octopus uses variously for jet propulsion, respiration, excretion and inking predators. A full-grown octopus can range in size from the Giant Pacific, with its six-metre arm span, to the 2.5 ...”

“... dark pocket at the outer edge the future king of England lowered his eyes to shake the hand of Robert Mugabe. We live in cultish times – not to say, occultist ones – in which it seems not unreasonable for people, en masse, to weep in the streets for public figures they previously cared little about. Pope John Paul II was pretty much like that ...”

“... except as a version of what television has accustomed us to call ‘fictionalised documentary’. Robert Phelps was able to construct a perfectly coherent autobiography from Colette’s scattered reminiscences, and present The Earthly Paradise as if it were, not an imaginative parallel to her life, but the real thing. All Colette’s biographers, even ...”

“... and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) – played a role in connecting the happenings to little green men. There were also influential works of non-fiction, such as a widely read article in Life, ‘Have We Visitors from Space?’, which appeared in April 1952. That summer, the number of reported sightings ‘skyrocketed’. It wasn’t long before people ...”

“... as an extravagance they could no longer afford. As early as 2009, the political scientist Robert Jervis argued that the presence of the international coalition was a problem in itself. The Taliban had roots in Afghan society: it was never going to be excluded from the country’s future. ‘Withdrawal without winning’ was the probable result. Jervis ...”

“... their muddy hobnailed boots go splashing into a wet and peaty meadow bordered with rich, green, swaying trees, cut by a savage wind, needled with driving rain, grey cloud looming over. Cheerfully, quickly, methodically, they roll the banners, for they are expensive banners . . . bought with the weekly threepences and sixpences of working men. Four ...”

“... Harris’s old Glasgow constituency is now represented in Edinburgh by Holly Bruce of the Scottish Green Party, which beat Labour into third place in both of Scotland’s main cities. ‘By the early 21st century,’ David Torrance writes in A History of the Scottish Labour Party, the party ‘appeared to have lost an empire but not yet found a role. The ...”

“... of the next hour or so they met other patrol groups from the company. ‘We then did a U-turn on Green 9 and Green 12’ – these were combat zones – ‘and turned into an area known to us as “India”,’ says Lance Sergeant Stephen Phipps. ‘We then made our way through the al-Mukatil al-Araby district. I’m not ...”