“... the best of these books are the ones we keep rereading. Tokyo Year Zero, the 2007 predecessor to David Peace’s new novel, conforms in its early pages to the first kind of mystery, specifically those described with cool backhandedness by Elizabeth Bowen when she wrote that ‘the only above-board grown-up children’s stories are detective ...”

“... laid me on the draining-board in the kitchen and stuck carbolic soap up my arse.’The young Reg didn’t like himself: ‘I was too fat, I was too short, my face just looked weird, my hair would never do what I wanted it to.’ As his parents fought, he found solace in his bedroom, where everything was kept in perfect order. He began to study the ...”

“... Pierre Simonard, as her joint fathers. Thus, at the moment when the revolution began, the three young women were already outside the conventions of bourgeois society and at best insecurely connected to the lower ranks of the aristocracy.Clothes had played their part in the gathering of revolutionary momentum. Before the (entirely male) Estates General ...”

“... 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 irony was that the party had itself helped to bring about that evidently uncomfortable state of affairs.’ It’s not that ...”

“... after he got tired of being a schoolmaster. He once said he had liked teaching because it kept him young, but acting let him be other people, and in the 1940s he thrived, voicing the RAF documentary Squadron 992 and appearing as the compere in the variety show Rainbow Round the Corner. Along with the BBC’s senior announcer, Leslie Mitchell, he became a voice ...”

“... The Case of Peter the Lett. In 1963 it was newly translated as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. David Bellos’s recent translation is the first with the confidence to call the book in English what it is called in French: Pietr the Latvian. Similarly, the second Maigret, another of my favourites, Le Charretier de ‘la Providence’, also from 1931, has ...”

“... has lived a quiet life there since her husband died in 1967. To the more than a hundred thousand young blacks who had come to the rally, hearing Mandela mention the name Luthuli was to hear the voice of an older generation reaching back still further with a gesture that not merely awakened the past but, in paying it homage, reclaimed it. Just a fortnight ...”

“... brought to life in April Blood, a history of the conspiracy that very nearly took the life of the young Lorenzo de’ Medici before he had a chance to become the ‘Magnifico’ of legend. Martines describes his book as a work of political history, but April Blood is most compellingly political in that it tells the story of a polity, a city state, poised ...”

“... Ministry of Defence’s Training Area and so is now the playground of those upright and blameless young men recently corrupted by the shameless women of Catterick. 15 February. The train from Leeds comes to a halt somewhere outside Wakefield, where it waits for ten minutes. Then, when we have got going again, there is a crash from the front of the train as if ...”

“... novels bristle with bits of autobiography. Take Le Rouge et le Noir. One of the books on which the young Julien Sorel dotes, is a book which moved the adolescent Henri Beyle: Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloise. When Julien starts taking letters from dictation, his employer, M. de La Mole, notices to his dismay that his newly engaged secretary spells cela with ...”

“... blurbs, and not only from other writers. He figures on Granta’s list of the ‘Twenty Best Young American Novelists’. The Spokanes were ‘a salmon tribe before they put those dams on the river’, fisherfolk living in settled villages. Most of Alexie’s work is set on their reservation in eastern Washington State, and what’s most alive in that ...”

“... The moment was late in 1970, at the Travellers’ Club in London, during a supper for 14 people. David Brower, the saint of eco-sanity from the Sierra Club in California, had just given a sermon, a hell-fire variant of the one geologists have used for a century or more: rocks are long, life is short, who do we think we are? Brower’s homily – which the ...”

“... that Dickens was then busy launching; one thanked a Sheffield firm (innocently mentioned in David Copperfield) for the gift of a set of knives; another attempted to patch up his lapsed friendship with George Cruikshank, who had probably been offended by Dickens’s attacks on his temperance pamphlets; another was a long, newsy report to a Swiss friend ...”

“... town of Korosten in Ukraine, who arrived in Britain in 1901, as having sought asylum. But he did. David Glover wants to find out how ‘a law restricting immigration [could] be passed in a country that had prided itself on offering asylum to refugees and had virtually made the right to freedom of movement across national boundaries an article of faith’, and ...”

“... And shall Trelawny die? It seems not, since David Crane’s book is the fourth life of him to have been published in the last sixty years. Yet it is an odd sort of immortality which leaves a man with someone else’s name in the title of his biography. It was Joseph Severn, the amiable artist whose kindness sweetened Keats’s last months, who referred to Trelawny as ‘Lord Byron’s jackal ...”