“... the presentation of the work approaches the borderline of mendacity. In these circumstances we may well ask: was the book worth writing? Fortunately, the answer is yes and for two reasons. First, because there is in the Soane Museum a mass of unpublished and rarely seen material relating to the founder’s early years. Not, indeed, as much as one would ...”

“... himself with Christ’. Certainly he inclined to treat Popes as vicars of Michelangelo. It may well be his own account of his mission, given narrative form by the fantasy underlying it, that Vasari recorded as a mini-myth which is in essence a de-Christianised and non-blasphemous version of the myth of the incarnation. Dr Liebert remarks that, after ...”

“... it furnishes a sequel to the best-selling Kane and Abel. This dynastic continuation (there may be more to come, presumably) follows the career of the Abel offspring Florentyna. Prodigally gifted and privileged from birth, Florentyna signals her future destiny by naming her first teddy-bear after the ‘Presidunk’, FDR. At six she maturely discusses ...”

“... Come Back Soon.’ They had agreed that STW should live on at Frome Vauchurch, and this, until May 1978, she did. ‘With a heart as normal as a stone’, but quite undaunted, she was still writing and reading voraciously – and giving dinner parties and denouncing Mrs Thatcher – to the very end. Misfortune and egoism, she thought, turned women into ...”

“... or perhaps a poet’s metaphor, but in any case have been found contrived and trivialising. There may be more to say for the appropriation of Auschwitz (including Höss himself) by a thick, mainstream American novel, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice: this actually has some reality about it, because it’s pretty sure in its own conventions, corny as these ...”

“... of fact. I am in a position to know. However right Paul Rogers, Lee Chadwick, Arthur Gavshon and I may have been, the fact is that without the sustained interest of Guardian readers, and, in my case, the Labour Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David Frost has christened us, could have carried on. Many ...”

“... loose correspondence, appropriation and inflation as well as some kinds of genuine influence, they may indeed, as they say, ‘put a spoke in the wheel’ of the ‘Joachimist bandwagon’. Yet the pressures of the time, and of some of its influential cultural formations, are so complex that they may, after all, give it a ...”

“... Commons: ‘We were the first people to govern ourselves through responsible representatives. We may be the last. The institution is so peculiarly English, has been so envied by other nations ... that the world has come to accept parliamentary government as a symbol of freedom.’ It was all splendidly ironic. For here was Namier, the great proponent of the ...”

“... If anxiety about identity too often stands in for actual drama in his fiction, for some it may be a preferable substitute. Dressing all this up in Raymond Carver’s clothes offers the prospect of an accessible synthesis. Of the collection’s title story, Schiff said: ‘Here Englander may just surpass the ...”

“... Manning Clark’s funeral, on 27 May 1991 at – to the surprise of many – St Christopher’s Roman Catholic Cathedral in Canberra, was attended by much of Australia’s ‘progressive’ elite: the governor-general (Bill Hayden), the prime minister (Bob Hawke), the deputy prime minister and future prime minister (Paul Keating), all of them at one time leaders of the Labor Party, along with much of the federal cabinet, the chief justice of the High Court and six hundred others ...”

“... sequence of dreary rhyming couplets at the end of his Wars of the Roses tetralogy: while Henry VII may have been as murderous as Richard III, he was nothing like as charming. Francis Bacon was ready to praise Henry’s politic wisdom in the 1622 biography that was to frame perceptions of the king until late in the 20th century, but he could not disguise the ...”

“... as principal ‘Cavalier’ poets: Robert Herrick, who advised us to gather ye rosebuds while we may, and Richard Lovelace, the stone walls of whose incarceration by Parliament did not a prison make. But what is Stubbs’s account of Milton, the spokesman for regicide, doing in the book? Why do we tour the agonised mind of the Scottish Calvinist Sir ...”

“... programme run by the United States Information Agency. Deciding not to use his return ticket on 1 May that year didn’t take great foresight: Serb units were already in place round Sarajevo and on 2 May the blockade began in earnest. Hemon, in Chicago, applied for political asylum and took any job he could find ...”

“... each historical fact in a single work. This novel features major and minor events from the period May 1940 to June 1941. This said, it should not be taken as an entirely accurate historical record of that year. This seems reasonable. The past can legitimately be bent a little, to make a shape, but not broken. There are wobbles early on, such as Geoffrey ...”

“... anything to develop or explain the provocative setting, though you keep expecting him to, which may be the point.) As the book begins, Tarent has just returned from a humanitarian expedition to Anatolia, during which his wife was killed by terrorists. Because the bomb used seems to have employed a mysterious new concept in quantum physics called ...”