“... missing, nothing to regret. Ackroyd shadows his man across the relevant period map, with perhaps a little too much fondness for local colour. Spelling it out for a transatlantic audience who no longer believe that London exists – unless it’s awash with muffin men or swathed in a blanket of Ripper’s fog. Time behaves itself, the chronology is ...”

“... he took another bath, this time in Mozart. He wallowed in Mozart; he luxuriated in him; he let the little Viennese soak away all the dirt and disgustingness he had had to sit through in his office all day. On this particular evening he had been to the public baths, Covent Garden, where their seats were immediately behind the Home Secretary. He, too, was taking ...”

“... the neighbourhood boys they used to hang out with were dead or in jail by then, and Minnie saw how little her children were doing besides chase women and arrange transactions with petty thieves. Chico stole casually from his father’s business and only realised how serious it was when Frenchy said he would kill him if he ever did it again. So, you get the ...”

“... and one of the last, occurred at Salem in Massachusetts Bay Colony – it was the subject of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. It began when the minister’s nine-year-old daughter, Betty Parris, and her cousin, Abigail Williams, complained that they were being tormented by invisible beings. Three local women, convicted of bewitching them, named other ...”

“... she has been appointed professor of social and political thought; the weekend after, she feels a little ill. A couple of months later, advanced ovarian cancer is found, and although she is able to finish the papers that will be published as Mourning Becomes the Law (1996), she doesn’t feel strong enough to start another major book. A friend suggests she ...”

“... lords and knights. Pierre will similarly come to see the faults of his father mirrored in the little portrait he has cherished of him as a debonair young man, a portrait that, once he is persuaded by the story of Isabel, he will throw into the fire. Being more exactingly literary than his mother, Pierre is haunted early on less by Romeo and Juliet than by ...”

“... and the good saw the affair as the story of a mean old television Goliath bullying a helpless little lefty David. The resulting goodwill was skilfully used to support the Institute of Ideas, which sprang from LM’s ashes. Others found in this miserable story an opportunity to let rip. ‘RCP members were the first to imitate neo-Nazis and deny the ...”

“... what made the killing so unsettling. It’s possible, of course, that Juliano’s murder had little to do with his work and more to do with the man himself. The most important question may not be who killed him, but why his killer, or killers, believed they could eliminate him with impunity. Whoever killed him knew that no one in the camp would rush to ...”

“... Argentinian beef. The Agriculture Minister, Nick Brown, is accused of doing too much and doing too little. The questions surrounding the foot and mouth epidemic – where will it all end? how did it all start? – might be understood to accord with anxiety about every aspect of British agriculture today. The worst has not been and gone. It is yet to ...”

“... even younger. Still, it was a shocking age to die, there was no disagreement about that and what little conviviality there might have been was muffled accordingly. Knowing the deceased, many of those filing into the church in surprisingly large numbers also knew each other, though in the circumstances prevailing at funerals and memorial services this is not ...”

“... by the urge to build the maximum number of new homes than by the urge to make as much (or lose as little) money as possible.Pat Quinn was born into the final waning of the old East End, where working-class Londoners rented rooms in cramped, crowded, badly maintained terraced houses with poor plumbing and sanitation. Aged twenty, just married, Quinn and her ...”

“... was Ross Miller, a friend, professor at the University of Connecticut and nephew of the playwright Arthur Miller. Unfortunately, the neph was no chip off the old oak. Hapless is perhaps the kindest word. A workhorse like Roth could only look on aghast at the lackadaisical and slapdash way Miller went about interviewing his literary colleagues, childhood ...”