“... But things have changed dramatically since then, and since the – in retrospect – even more innocent time of the publication of White Teeth (2000). Looking back on her earlier novels in a speech she gave in Berlin in 2016, included here under the title ‘On Optimism and Despair’, Smith notes that people often ask her whether she has lost her ...”

“... Fiction substitutes for reality, as he hunches over his video recorder; but life imitates art far more than the other way round, as the Connor-and-Eaton film prefigures the plot of the Winshaw saga, itself a mélange of sober factology and extravagant fantasy. In Gothic, history weighs like a nightmare on the present; in consumerist capitalism, the present ...”

“... everything, from T-shirts to hotels to cars to weather, and sometimes the colour-coding is even more striking than the soundtrack. Legend has it that the series was born from a studio memo that read simply ‘MTV cops’, and certainly the episodes often look like music videos, an effect enhanced by guest appearances from Phil Collins, Willie Nelson, Little ...”

“... its nightmare fugues to his Symphonie Fantastique. But this eager congregation makes it all the more puzzling that De Quincey should see himself as opium’s first and only celebrant. There was, after all, no mystery about the drug itself, perhaps the best-known medicine of its day and available in any high-street pharmacy. It was a recourse for pain of all ...”

“... wins Whitbread’, ‘Triumph of Thirty-Year Novel’, ‘Jeff’s in the Swing’), or herald more widely Glasgow’s extraordinary swell of literary talent. It seems that in the West of Scotland the sounds of heavy industry have given way to a quite different rhythm, one hammered out on word-processors and tested in literary workshops. With the initial ...”

“... in primitive forgery, or mimic it. It is not clear that even an arch literary forger like Thomas J. Wise actually committed a criminal act for which he could be prosecuted by the DPP. It would be sensible to replace the term ‘literary forgery’ with Anthony Grafton’s neologism, ‘pseudepigrapha’. This blanket description would cover everything ...”

“... severing the present from the remembered past. And even today, when professional historians seem more concerned to compute the past than to connect it with the present, the histories that readers remember and long to reread are usually those which treat their subjects – no matter how remote – as places the writers remember and long to revisit. Historical ...”

“... labour. In the 16th century, when the political process rested less on institutions and more on informal networks and shared expectations, a regime was only ever a few steps away from disaster. Robert Cecil knew only too well how much work was required to keep the country stable. He had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, William ...”

“... namely, dead bodies or pieces of them – bones, dust, scraps of blood-soaked cloth. So an even more puzzling question arises: why should the holy dead need their mortal remains to do great things? Other cultures and religions have also venerated their dead, whether ancestors in general or a special class of holy persons – Hebrew prophets, Shi’ite ...”

“... on her tomb in Westminster Abbey have been carefully polished in the expectation of ever more flower-strewing pilgrims: at this rate she is liable to find herself transferred from her inconspicuous position in the cloisters to the very centre of Poets’ Corner. Unfortunately for Todd, the burgeoning Behn industry in which she has secured such a ...”

“... ruled by the advice of a devil and that his reign would bring destruction to every man’s door. More alarming still, because it was so generally believed, was the rumour that the deposed Richard had escaped from his captivity and was still alive, waiting off the coast of Scotland, ‘in an island called Albion’, until the day appointed for his return in ...”

“... something of an oversimplification, but not all that much. The tradition is rich and unbroken: in Thomas Elyot’s Latin dictionary of 1538 we find aedificium ‘building’, in Bullokar’s English dictionary of 1616 the minimally anglicised edifice ‘a building’, in the 1979 Collins edifice ‘a building’. For all their bright newness, dictionaries of ...”

“... Jinnie Fullerton. This horrible cough! Kind souls. Perhaps their prayers will work with a few more Hail Marys thrown in. Connie or Jinnie (never mind which) murmured ‘The Lord has delivered you into our hands.’ 2 ‘No personal God or any such nonsense’ – Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp to Murry, spouse, from Villa Isola Bella, Menton, 18 October ...”

“... The enterprise in any form, of course, involved a crushing weight of primary research: there are more than two hundred and ninety volumes of Francis Place papers in the British Museum. Mr Miles found working through them ‘arduous’ if ‘fascinating’. Because of their great bulk he took ten years to finish his biography (having, in a manner worthy of ...”

“... not the alcohol that is making me sleepy. What is happening isn’t even sleepiness exactly, more a minor existential crisis. Still, I suppose the assumption is fair, given the smell on my breath – and this is enough to get me moving. The process is slow and painfully deliberate, but after a moment of supreme effort I eventually, miraculously, get to ...”