“... in Syria is in the low hundreds. The figure may be exaggerated, but it is still likely enough that young men from the UK who fail to find martyrdom in Syria will return to fight at home. Syria is now host to two al-Qaida-related organisations: the al-Nusra Front and alongside it (and sometimes in competition with it) the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham ...”

“... alcohol and morphine. But the persona he created still drives sales sixty years after his death. Michael Hofmann’s 2009 translation of his last novel, Alone in Berlin, sold around 350,000 copies in the UK alone, 100,000 of them in the first three months after publication. Much of Alone in Berlin’s success has to do with the way the story is told. Otto ...”

“... in the 1960s and early 1970s Johnson was, as Coe’s publishers maintain, ‘one of the best-known young novelists in Britain’, but his celebrity quickly faded. Now, as this large biography attests, there has been a revival of interest. Coe has worked on his book for years, occasionally lamenting the loss of time that might have been devoted to writing ...”

“... is meant as a joke. 15 January. Go into the chemist in Camden High Street to find a down-at-heel young man not quite holding the place to ransom but effectively terrorising the shop. He keeps pulling items off the shelves, and waving them in the face of the blonde assistant saying: ‘This is mine. And this is mine. The whole shop’s mine. It’s bought ...”

“... Keneally anatomises historical Australia by plucking from its origins a strange factual nugget. Michael Ondaatje does something similar for Canada with a wispy succession of word paintings eerily evocative of a past he cannot have known but can magically conjure. His prose is consciously poetic and at first sight seems more conditioned by the need to ...”

“... did not lack for houses. After some years of struggle and sometimes genuine hardship – as a young man he knew hunger, and on more than one occasion was reduced to sleeping rough – he found financial success, if not security, with Darkness at Noon and the commissions that followed the acclaim with which that book was received in the Western world. He ...”

“... advocate. My own hunch is that other Gurney personae usually written off as lunatic fictions – Michael Flood, Frederick Saxby, Valentine Fane, Griffiths Davies and so on: there were many – may yet turn out to be comrades from the trenches, those other persons he so loved. Although writing of place-names rather than people, P.J. Kavanagh puts the matter ...”

“... the Oppenheimers moved to San Francisco (the family name was changed about ten years later). As a young adult, Oppen came under pressure from his father to succeed in business and reacted by taking his distance. In 1928, while hitch-hiking around the country with Mary Colby, whom he married in Dallas, he bought a little sailing boat; they took it from Detroit ...”

“... melancholy – what she called her ‘indifference to life’. She had come near to suicide when young, and in 1926 confessed that ‘I have always been haunted by the fear of life and in old age one’s fear becomes a more continuous state of mind.’ That she had not killed herself she attributed to the social habit of Sidney, the therapy of prayer, and ...”

“... 29-year-old who has fallen among bad company, a prodigal genius who has lived fast and is to die young, and whose last recorded utterances, all of them heretical, included the opinions that ‘St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned alwaies to his bosom . . . he vsed him as the sinners of Sodoma’ and that ‘all they that loue not Tobacco ...”

“... Deborah Nadoolman Landis, is herself a celebrated Hollywood designer (Raiders of the Lost Ark; Michael Jackson’s Thriller) and now a professor of design history at UCLA; the show consists of some pieces of her own, and many others from Debbie Reynolds’s collection, recently sold – she had pioneered salvaging costumes from studio wardrobes. Landis has ...”

“... the comic novel: the distribution of appropriate rewards and punishments. One sub-plot involves a young breeder struggling to raise a child and maintain a stableful of thoroughbreds inherited from her grandfather. She attempts to keep the farm going not because she has to, but because it’s in her blood, and her efforts are vindicated when one of her ...”

“... regular and true . . . Seasons were respecting their sequence. Time could be relied on.’ For young Fiennes there was the peculiar and nervy other factor that serious illness had destabilised him, making him hungrier for the enclosing warmth of home and also avid to ‘celebrate my return from the state of being ill’ by lighting out ‘for the new, for ...”

“... notes) Vol. – Volunteer – Thomas Ashe, who died in Mountjoy Prison 25 September 1917, to Vol. Michael Devine, INLA, who died in the Maze 20 August 1981. Above is a dove of peace caged in barbed wire; below the quote: ‘I’ll wear no convict’s uniform, nor meekly serve my time.’ Less ringing, and not attributed to the IRA, is the nearby Bloody Sunday ...”

“... to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules ... No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.’ It doesn’t come off here and Ackroyd shouldn’t have done it. The most informative of the interludes is the sixth, where Ackroyd the novelist cross-examines Ackroyd the biographer. ‘Are ...”