“... authoritarian, hypocritical and morally bankrupt administration almost since the day it took office in 1979. Its ministers have been resigning (or not resigning) in disgrace ever since its inception. The nepotism shown towards its ‘family’ of opportunistic supporters has been evident from the start but has now grown to such a level that even the ...”

“... circuitous route, adaptation had come around to at least the prospect of elimination. Few people took Reagan’s rhetoric seriously, until Mikhail Gorbachev sensed, on meeting the President for the first time in Geneva in 1985, that he might actually mean what he was saying. The new Soviet leader tested this possibility with a proposal for the outright ...”

“... taxonomists who gave the names to the fossils. Suppose that in some lineage evolutionary change took place at a more or less steady rate, to such an extent that the earliest and latest forms are sufficiently different to warrant their being placed in different species. If there is at some point a gap in the record, because suitable deposits were not being ...”

“... or deport gay people from Ireland. Tom Inglis’s book deals with the ways in which Catholicism took root in Ireland. ‘It was peculiar to Ireland,’ he wrote, ‘and it was to have a lasting effect, that the whole civilising process took place in and through the Catholic Church. Due to the absence of a native rural ...”

“... This was not some panicky ‘collateral damage’ fire-fight: the men of Charlie Company took a long time to dishonour and dismember the women, round up and despatch the children and make the rest of the villagers lie down in ditches while they walked up and down shooting them. Not one of the allegedly ‘searing’ films about the war – not ...”

“... man, though hardly to redeem him. Purdy’s early stories have nothing so fierce to show. He took more risks in his first novel, the picaresque-satirical Malcolm (1959), but his novel-writing career amounts to a series of lurches towards explicitness and even extremity, alternating with retreats to safer ground. His second novel, The Nephew (1961), is ...”

“... Ballin, compiled 54 ornately-bound volumes of diaries, which his son eventually entrusted to John Vincent for editing ‘That Lord Crawford was a man of distinction was agreed by all,’ attests Vincent, who seems unduly impressed by royal letters of condolence. Nevertheless, Vincent admits to finding it slightly difficult ‘to convey something of his ...”

“... pet, was unmarried at nearly twenty-five – ‘a queer little fish’, a feminist, when he took her to Rome in 1889. She had permission (she was musical) to play the organ at St Peter’s. Among the listeners was a middle-aged Prussian officer, Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin. The Count admired her and pursued her through Europe, but to ...”

“... it, as Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, and the arrival in 1605 of a man with a mission: John White, known to posterity as the ‘patriarch of Dorchester’. All Christians should live according to Christ’s teachings, lay up treasure in Heaven and follow God rather than man. Evidence of their doing so is less than universal. Yet sometimes we find ...”

“... the fact that few of his contemporaries regarded Orwell’s writing highly in the Thirties, or took his ideas seriously. And this comparative disregard lasted well into the war years. His ‘As I please’ column in Tribune amused and irritated, the articles on boys’ weeklies and vulgar comic postcards were a novel approach to popular culture, but they ...”

“... of whom were beaten, tortured or raped; and that an exodus from the country of roughly two million took place – most of them people who thought their lives were in danger. Two among the thousands of case-histories investigated by the Commission provide proof and symbol of the kind of crimes that were being committed while a not entirely ignorant world looked ...”

“... had now discovered the work she was born to do; each book thereafter was an erudite game and she took great pleasure in it, testing her own intelligence and the intelligence of her readers, now a much reduced party. It probably did not help her British sales that in 1968 she moved to Paris, taught linguistics and related subjects, and was soon in close touch ...”

“... preceding Classes’. Even this relatively simple task appeared to be beyond many local officials. John Rickman, who, following the lead of France and the United States, had dreamed up the idea of a nationwide head count and persuaded Parliament to back it, described the enumerators as men ‘who answer plain questions with much sincerity, but to whom ...”

“... Wrestling was big. Both WWF and WCW were available, briefly, on terrestrial TV, and my friend John and I founded our own wrestling magazine. We hashed it together with the help of the pre-broadband Ask Jeeves internet, surreptitiously, with nerve-shredding slowness, loading pages during IT lessons so that we could copy and paste match reports into no ...”

“... Readers of John Updike’s previous novel, The Witches of Eastwick, will not have forgotten Darryl Van Horne’s bottom: how, at the end of a game of tennis, Darryl dropped his shorts and thrust his hairy rump into his partner’s face, demanding that she kiss it, which she did. In Roger’s Version the roles are reversed ...”