“... in 1996, they can get a fix on how much nicer they are now. And this in turn keeps them up to the mark: they do things that won’t seem too terrible in four years’ time. Or forty. Even the most rudimentary diary can have this usefulness. ‘Did I really have lunch so often with him/her? Assuredly, I’ve travelled far since then. And, even allowing for ...”

“... in ways both surprising and not, and one has the sense of a master machinist, who has measured his mark exactly. It could be argued that it’s at times too neat. That sometimes it all comes together a little too well. That it’s all pitched rather melodramatically. Zola, for all of his scientific analogising, was something of a romantic at heart; he paints ...”

“... tracing it through Melville’s ‘The Confidence Man’, Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ and Mark Twain’s delight in tall tales. But sometime, date unspecified, he believes a new thing happened: people began to take it seriously and believe it. His contemporary evidence for hype’s ‘essentially American origins’ is based on Gore Vidal; it hardly ...”

“... Elizabeth puts up against her husband, the Man of Wrath. His potato-pickers, she notes, get a mark and a half a day. ‘The women get less, not because they work less, but because they are women and must not be encouraged.’ Her delight in the weather and the forests would go for nothing without her calm, dry, outrageous defence of herself as a ...”

“... breaks into Latin: ‘Hic et ubique?’ (Here and everywhere?) The Latin, and the question mark if it is authentic, appeal to something generally understood. Greenblatt has sensibly looked for a liturgical source, and found it in prayers for the souls of those buried in churchyards – part of the considerable effort made in the period just before the ...”

“... so that Stevenson could sit on sunny days with a writing board perched on his knee.Sir Henry Taylor, a colonial reformer and poet-dramatist, had a villa in Bournemouth; he was 84 that year. He had an eye for talent, and had once been friends with Wordsworth and Coleridge – he described them, rather memorably, wandering the hills, ‘each irradiating ...”

“... of the suspicion that Churchill often drank pretty hard, and why shouldn’t he have done? A.J.P. Taylor refers to a letter from Churchill to Beaverbrook as ‘brusque’. Gilbert queries whether the description is just, though the letter looks brusque enough to this reviewer. On Gilbert’s behalf it should be urged that there are many black legends about ...”

“... He closes by using Hartley Dean and Margaret Melrose’s studies of Luton in 1996 and Yvette Taylor’s of Tyneside in 2007-8 to track how social division and economic marginalisation have done their work. The original case notes and questionnaires are a rich source, but also a tricky one. The sociologist Mike Savage has suggested that interview ...”

“... invention. A number of Serre’s protagonists are called ‘Anne’ or ‘Anna’, and ‘mon ami Mark’, who shares the name of her friend and translator Mark Hutchinson, sometimes makes an appearance. Islands recur, so does fate, suicide, sequences of women, hot air balloons, knives with ivory handles, absent ...”

“... of the desert were yellow, biscuit, ash, rose, brick, silvery green, sullen green. Hardly a human mark or scratch was to be seen beyond the mess of the city: but if you went out along the highways you would find at intervals, under bloated plastic and neon signs, all-American strips or zips of hamburger joints, motels, gas-stations and used-car lots. Then ...”

“... of incest; but also a houseful of real antiques, and a heroine who really does look like Elizabeth Taylor. Call it Indiana for beginners. The previous books have added to their allure by an aggressive approach to some of the last few taboos: gay sex (particularly when allied to violence and/or manipulation); violence (particularly when allied to manipulation ...”

“... voluptuous cunning, and posterity has followed suit. Shakespeare struggled to improve on Plutarch, Taylor and Burton on Shakespeare, and each generation has got the Cleopatra it wanted. Most recently, Lyndsey Marshal’s drugged-up sexual acrobat – a footballer’s Wag version in the BBC Rome series – has lured thousands of priapic adolescents into ...”

“... Bar BQ. Her new job is as ‘caregiver’ or ‘day-mummy’ to Duff, the adopted daughter of Taylor and Wylie, liberal New York achievers. The asexual, corporate-sounding names are spot-on for the Eighties. When death reappears at a hot-dog stall in Central Park, she splits to Iowa, where she is Jane to Bud Ripplemeyer’s Rochester, a day-and-night ...”

“... The point Wittkower might have made about the Escorial, the point that one of his students, René Taylor, did make, was that it was an attempt to reconstruct that lost master-piece of architectural proportion, the Temple of Jerusalem, as seen by a Spanish Jesuit, J.B. Villalpando. Villalpando interpreted the book of Ezekiel as evidence that God had revealed ...”

“... academic performances: Plamenatz, Berlin, Pocock, Shklar, Wolin, Schaar, and more recently Kelly, Taylor, Ryan, Skinner and Simonds. It is a mark of John Dunn’s distinction that this is the company in which he belongs. But in one crucial way he has outstripped his peers. For he has begun to show cogently in a quite new ...”