“... though, seems to have rather thrived on his unpopularity: why else would he paint his church pews black, drive slowly in the middle of the road, tick off locals he caught ordering their groceries in English? Wintle’s biography is not short of spooky-vicar anecdotes, and we often get the feeling that for Thomas the only good church is an empty one. Thomas ...”

“... my son, my son Absalom!’ And this, in summary, is the plot of The Book of Dave. Dave Rudman is a black-cab driver in London; he marries Michelle; they get divorced; Dave loses his son, Carl. Like the story of King David, it’s a story of family breakdown. Also like his namesake, Dave is a verbal genius. Reading Self is often reminiscent not of William ...”

“... For some years,​ I have nursed a modest hope concerning Ian McEwan: that one day he should write a novel without a catastrophic turning point, or a shattering final twist. That for once no one should be involved in a freak ballooning accident, or be brained by a glass table, or be wrongly convicted of a country-house rape; that no one should experience a marriage-ending bout of premature ejaculation, or have their child stolen in a supermarket, or suffer a terrifying home invasion at the hands of a thug with an easily diagnosed neurological condition ...”

“... one. This extraordinary act of household removal formed part of the proceedings in the trial of Ian Huntley, the man who is accused of the murder of two small girls in Soham, whose deaths, as we now know by his own peculiar account, took place in his bathroom. Since one of the girls is held to have drowned in the bath, the prosecution saw fit to have this ...”

“... to do it but forget it. A German Requiem jumps forward to 1947-48, to the hardship, ignominy and black-market economics of life in Germany (and Austria) before Dr Schacht wrought his miracle. It also represents an advance by Philip Kerr, if not quite such a substantial one as I’d hoped. Bernie has had a useful war for a private investigator who will be ...”

“... Last month, Ian McEwan announced that we have eight years left to save the planet from global warming. The timeframe seems to be based less on the scientific evidence than on the audacious hope that Obama’s administration will avert the impending environmental catastrophe. McEwan acknowledged that ‘within the climate science community there is a faction darkly murmuring that it is already too late,’ but stood by the ‘majority view’ that doom won’t be certain until Obama leaves the White House ...”

“... 130 rounds were fired. Ten men were killed, including Walter Chapman and his brother; one, Alan Black, survived despite having being shot 18 times. The Kingsmill massacre took place the day after five Catholic men were shot dead by a loyalist gang that included at least one RUC officer. At about 6 p.m. three masked men went into a house in Whitecross (near ...”

“... thereafter set out with Beatrice to admire the USSR; while the worst uprooting of Rhodesia’s black peasantry (as well as the run-up to Mau Mau in Kenya) took place under another noted Fabian Colonial Secretary, Arthur Creech Jones. Ranger is at pains to insist that Zimbabwe’s road to independence has been neither a carbon copy of Kenyan capitalism ...”

“... Ian McGuire​ ’s second novel is an unflinching look at what men do, in extreme circumstances, for money, to survive, or for no reason at all. It has quite a lot – filth, sex, violence, swearing, historical revisionism – in common with TV shows like HBO’s Deadwood and its many descendants (including Peaky Blinders, excellent despite its terrible title, whose third series aired recently on BBC2), and for all its high moral seriousness, it grips like a horror movie ...”

“... love Alias Grace? With Banks, you knew what you were getting (and the excellent old Abacus black and white book jackets meant you could see it coming). Fourth, what you were getting was a style that wasn’t at all ‘difficult’ or opaque, ensuring a low barrier to entry for readers. Again, this is probably a question of innate style rather than ...”

“... away. Whatever the truth of this matter, the whole wooing and winning of Debbie is there in black and white, including the minor dirty trick Dr Owen played on a fellow MP to get rid of him (he mentioned the poor chap’s wife and kiddies in Debbie’s presence). But these passages in the early part of the book are the soul of discretion in comparison ...”

“... or stolen. The Hôtel Drouot in Paris sold more than a million objects in the 1941-2 season. Black marketeers, dealers of all nationalities, anonymous French collectors, all wanted a piece of the action. Goering came to Paris and bought truck loads of paintings and sculpture. So did Hans Frank, Albert Speer and Hitler himself. The art market in New ...”

“... art and innovativeness behind his seemingly artless prose, but with some few exceptions – Ian Dyck is one – current historians are not much interested in Cobbett. Mainly this is because he appears too much a known quantity, but it is also the case that what was once styled labour history has become deeply unfashionable, while Cobbett can seem too ...”

“... Women in History (Michael O’Mara, £15.99) and with a cover where the word ‘evil’ appears in black in a type size several magnitudes greater than that of its supporting syntax. Nor should we be surprised for a second time to find that this is a set of potted life-stories to go with a ten-week television series that has just got under way on Channel ...”

“... is much closer to the experience of being English than you would expect from a caricature.Ian McEwan’s new novel is as English as they come. The ‘lessons’ of the title aren’t meant to be lessons in how to write an English novel, but they might as well be: it’s the sort of book only an English man of a certain age would set out to write ...”