“... heavily on such Western travellers to Mecca as Ludovico de Varthema, Domingo Badia y Leblich, John Lewis Burckhardt and Richard Burton. While most Western reports pretended to be objective, in some cases this was a pretence only, and Peters would have been better advised to have treated Varthema’s 16th-century Itinerario as a novel about oriental ...”

“... of the Radio Age’, and acknowledges the strong effect on her of the annual Box of Delights – John Masefield’s exemplary exercise in quintessential Christmas makebelieve. Is this one source of Angela Carter’s feeling for the fantastic? What she shares with Masefield – the Masefield of the Kay Harker stories anyway – is an ability to locate her ...”

“... pressed, when Draco Malfoy has what can only be described as an epiphany. He’s standing at the foot of his bed, hand poised to drop a newly bought textbook in the trunk with the rest of his school supplies, when it hits him, like lightning, like a hex, like Granger’s slap in third year …*I became an addict when I was 14. But it wasn’t drugs, or ...”

“... grievances; an antipathy to supranational governance and political correctness. These John Bullish attitudes seem far removed from the polite Europhile paternalism we tend to associate with one-nation Conservatives.Johnson has some similar attitudes, and has a following of scary nationalists on the Tory right, but he is careful to keep a ...”

“... social democratic solution, tried by George Brown and Harold Wilson in the Sixties and by Michael Foot and Jim Callaghan in the Seventies, is the ‘social contract’ – a private deal between the Government and the unions, by which the unions trade wage restraint in return for extensions of their organisational power. As the last Government showed, such a ...”

“... 1957 the search for a pay policy intensified. Comparability became more and more of a problem; Sir John Cameron, adjudicating a railway pay claim, declared that the nation ‘having willed the end, the nation must will the means’; it was not an answer any government could for long accept. Government’s increasing concern with wages was accompanied by the ...”

“... a poet was over, though he continued to work on, and eventually published, his translations of St John of the Cross, which many consider his most important work. In 1952 he moved again, this time to Portugal, and there, in 1957, he died in an automobile accident, in a car driven by his wife. Campbell has been called a Romantic (though he himself disliked the ...”

“... odd fish?’ Severn also asked, and Crane’s book is an attempt to answer that question. Edward John Trelawny was born in 1792 and died in 1881. In his later years he was a legendary figure, farouche and craggy, a solitary survivor from an epoch which already seemed fabulously remote: here, living on deep into the later Victorian age was a man who had once ...”

“... white glasses who would rather be a gay man), Barbie’s Queer Accessories nonetheless keeps one foot high on the moral ground of traditional liberalism, obeying only half of Oscar Wilde’s First Rule of Camp: to ‘treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.’ Another ...”

“... corpses: Presently I saw two men crawling on the ground … I recognised one as Robin. His left foot was smashed to pulp, mingled with the remainder of a boot. But as I spoke to Robin saying, ‘Have you got a tourniquet, Robin?’ and he answered apologetically, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t, Peter,’ I looked at the second man. Only his clothes ...”

“... in the Fifties, but which have since become available. Substantial biographies of Lawrence by John Mack and Jeremy Wilson, in 1976 and 1989 respectively, have denigrated Aldington’s achievement. Nevertheless he got quite a lot right and it was never again going to be possible to treat Lawrence as simply the preux chevalier, the schoolboyish hero of ...”

“... were awkwardly placed in mid-Victorian Kensington. Their friends included the ageing Radical John Bright and Elizabeth Gaskell’s widower, William. But smart society was closed to them and this was something that Beatrix’s mother, Helen, seems to have minded deeply. A grim-faced little woman, she apparently occupied herself entirely with a round of ...”

“... Aquitaine, who is appointed abbess of a remote and failing convent. But where Matrix is fleet of foot, even glancing, skipping past whole decades of its protagonist’s life, The Vaster Wilds is close to the ground: every dirt clod, passing thought, night terror, flash of fever and aching muscle is registered. Groff has framed the two novels as the first ...”

“... have cruised down the Lea Valley from Lippitt’s Hill Camp at High Beach, a base right beside John Clare’s Epping Forest asylum, and they’ll be back again tomorrow. Sukhdev Sandhu, who flew with the sky cops for his book Night Haunts, called the experience ‘the panoptic sublime’. The machines cost half a million pounds each, a sum that pays for a ...”

“... No American writer​ ever revealed more in a photograph than Joan Didion. She was small, five foot one and three-quarter inches tall, which she fudged on her California driver’s licence as five two. She weighed nothing. Somewhere there must be a photograph of her beaming with delight but I’ve never seen it. With age, her neck thinned ...”