“... Henry Farr is – or, as it turns out, is not – the ‘Wimbledon Poisoner’ of Nigel Williams’s title. He is a Pooterish solicitor, middling and muddling his way through life; the plot concerns his repeated farcical failure to murder his awful wife, bumping off (he thinks) other innocent people instead. Then, as the plot unravels and a real poisoner shows his hand, Henry discovers that his wife is not so awful after all ...”

“... those lives themselves are less significant? ‘Colour is not a human or personal reality,’ James Baldwin said, ‘it is a political reality.’ Substitute ‘gender’, ‘ethnic identity’ or ‘class’ for the word ‘colour’, and one sees how far-ranging and how potentially anarchic the controversy is. And how far from being resolved, or even ...”

“... and that we cannot always expect its intellectuals to approach us with the colonial cringe of Henry James or T.S. Eliot. Rorty made us realise how much poorer we are if Jefferson, Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Stowe, Peirce, William James, Santayana and Dewey are not familiar landmarks in our intellectual scenery. And ...”

“... spies on her housemates from the privacy of the attic and sees ‘Fleur and Alan coming together, Henry and Ingrid under pressure, Simona and William falling apart’. Her novel will be based on their pillow talk. In the second week of the holiday she suffers a reverse. The cameras are discovered and an angry guest contacts the press. A tell-all story ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... ironic machinery of repetition and guarantee. It opens with a description of the dying days of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who bought his own land in Virginia and now, scandalously, owns slaves himself. He always wanted to be a better master than his own. ‘He did not understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed ...”

“... private vendettas, had brought charges against the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who had investigated Trump for fraud.A recess was called and the chosen jurors were led off for lunch at the Silverado Buffet. I was looking for somewhere to have lunch myself when the judge fell in step with me. He seemed glad of my interest in his court ...”

“... barely walk unaided, never mind stroll up to a man and shoot him. The two cops were shot at by Henry Methvin, a drunken con, and finished off by Clyde, as Bonnie sat in the Ford cuddling Sonny Boy. The photos that shocked the public were not in themselves so unusual. In the miserable Dallas slums they both grew up in, one of the few affordable ways for ...”

“... she met Yeats, was part of the spirit of the age. In 1891, the year before George’s birth, Alice James confided to her diary: ‘I suppose the thing “medium” has done more to degrade spiritual conception than the grossest form of materialism or idolatry: was there ever anything transmitted but the pettiest, meanest, coarsest facts and details: anything ...”

“... wasn’t written by Hilary Mantel or Antonia Fraser. It was written more than 140 years ago by James Anthony Froude, whose History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada put the Tudor show on the road. That wasn’t Froude’s only legacy. His Life of Carlyle, published in 1885, inaugurated modern biography, biography with ...”

“... in childbirth; his handwriting was shaky and he blotted his signature. When in the 1590s the poet Henry Lok, anxiously seeking patronage, dedicated sonnets to the great men of the age, he wrote of Robert Cecil’s ‘painefull daies, your many watchfull nights’. He wasn’t exaggerating. Stephen Alford’s All His Spies is an account of a man at the heart ...”

“... What is funny and forlorn, where is the comic pathos, in the following sentence? ‘A fortune-teller once read my cards and said that if it wasn’t for a tiny black cloud hanging over me I could do great things and not only for my country but for all mankind.’ Instantly, a person opens before us like a quick wound: probably a man (that slight vibration of a swagger), grandiose in aspiration but glued to a petty destiny, eccentric and possibly mad, a talker, rowdy with anecdote ...”

“... Elizabeth. The greater part of the book explores the plays about English history: the six King Henry plays and two King Richard plays, which relate the origins and course of the Wars of the Roses, and King John. But there are also extensive discussions of the contemporary political pertinence of Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida ...”

“... he himself often contemplated following suit. (‘Save us from shotguns & fathers’ suicides,’ Henry prays in his elegy for Ernest Hemingway of 1961). Among the great innovations of The Dream Songs is Berryman’s ability to reproduce on the page the slurring of consciousness and disintegration of language when subjected to such pressures. Take these lines ...”

“... Since completing the quartet of LA crime novels that made his name, James Ellroy has left us in no doubt that he wants to be more than a genre writer, embarking on a series of books intended to rewrite the history of America between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, the ‘Underworld USA’ trilogy. The title is a tribute to Sam Fuller, who directed the film of the same name, but the initial impetus came – as Ellroy frequently acknowledges – from Libra, Don DeLillo’s Lee Harvey Oswald novel ...”