“... for economical exposition in any format and many of the direct quotations from interviews sink home with the incisiveness of sound-bites. Some of this may be little more than off-the-record background bitching, but a number of splendidly tactless remarks are explicitly attributed. There is a particularly revealing section on the social frisson provoked by ...”

“... to him as his desire for women was self-affirming and ecstatic,’ Susan Cheever wrote in Home before Dark, published three years after Cheever’s death in 1982. It was the first public admission that ‘the Ovid of Ossining’, the man who once said his epitaph should read ‘Here lies John Cheever/He never disappointed a hostess/Or took it up the ...”

“... the ore shipments was now a secondary issue: there was more concern to restore Allied prestige at home and abroad after the failure to do anything to save Finland. Contrary to expectations, the German response was swift and ruthless. The Allies found themselves responding to a German initiative in circumstances for which they were deplorably unprepared. Dr ...”

“... be better made to some such document of enveloping contingency as Hofmannsthal’s ‘Letter of Lord Chandos’. The narrative is prone to sudden plunges: disaster strikes repeatedly at the end of Part One, sweeping off half the characters, but at least Banville is good at describing death. The sickness and passing of the narrator’s grandfather, Jack ...”

“... depict contests for world domination as Manichean battles against monstrous opponents (as in The Lord of the Rings), the heroic model in antiquity demanded a contest between two noble adversaries. Even when the ‘other’ is a monster, like the centaurs seen in Greek temple friezes grappling with Heracles and the Lapiths, it is idealised and humanised, its ...”

“... to find things out. I went online and read about Balaklava. It wasn’t long before I put ‘Lord Raglan’ into a search engine and soon I was listening to an 1890 recording of Tennyson intoning ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. I was able to read the words as he spoke them and hear the crackles on Thomas Edison’s original wax cylinder ...”

“... extreme symptom of the deracination afflicting almost everyone around Eagle Lake. Despite its down-home preponderance of bait stores, preachers, bass fishing and quiet country roads, the novel frequently tips over into the frazzled territory of white noise and simulacra, ‘postwar, Postmodern, posthuman’, where hospital patients watch hospital shows on TV ...”

“... release, a place to express feelings of frustration or despair. The bizarre, explosive diary of Lord Reith – which he conceived of as a sober historical record – was, in practice, a depository for the bad feelings he had towards everybody who stood in his way. However happy they may be in their private lives, it is unusual for politicians not to feel ...”

“... by the East, although he travels further (geographically, at least) than Murray’s characters. Lord William Arthur Valerian Pommeroy is the hippy aristocrat who, in Nobuko Albery’s Absurd Courage, becomes so fascinated by Oriental thought that he founds a kind of guerrilla priesthood, the World Elsewhere. For him, emulation becomes ...”

“... perhaps in the acknowledged influence on him, at Glasgow University, of the lectures of the future Lord Kelvin, with their insistence, as Frazer put it, on ‘a conception of the physical universe as regulated by exact and absolutely unvarying laws of nature’. After Glasgow Frazer went on to Trinity, acquiring honours at each stage, and then read for the ...”

“... fantasy acquired years ago, thereby initiating a popular taste for such works: Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. John Sutherland also noted that Knowledge of Angels commits the sin any fabulist should avoid, and that Tolkien certainly sidestepped: displaying a meaning that is too determinate and obvious. It could be said, on the other hand, that Walsh ...”

“... to possessing the Bard, is never so whimsical. Another time, Warton is staying at the Hampshire home of a friend and, browsing in his ‘study of old fashioned Books’, comes upon ‘A Description of the Queens (Elisabeth) Entertainment in Progresse, at Lord Hartford’s at Elvetham in Hantsshire’, published in ...”

“... the secret financial relationships of MPs. Summoning his allies, including Lady Thatcher and Lord Archer in the House of Lords, Hamilton inspired an amendment to the Defamation Act then going through Parliament. The amendment, which was drummed through both Houses by the Tory majority, who behaved exactly as if they were being whipped, gave MPs the right ...”

“... his father absent for long periods of time (eluding arrest for past crimes, making money to send home, or selling bogus oil-rights to suckers), Jim dropped out of high school to support his family as a bellboy at the Hotel Texas, and quickly learnt how to supply his guests with more than just the keys to their rooms. According to Thompson’s latest ...”

“... For a short time she had fantasised that I would many M., a young man who would inherit a stately home. My grandmother dubbed him ‘the Duke’, no doubt hoping that the flippant nickname would disguise the fervour of her hopes for me. When she realised I wasn’t interested, she joked that it would be better if I married a sweep. Sweeps would always be in ...”