“... letters they sent home to mothers, fathers and brothers, mostly in the Punjab, are anything to go by. Similar letters home, sent by British soldiers to Surrey or Wolverhampton or Newcastle, were, it is true, mostly composed in the same vein: it was considered almost a military duty to sound cheery, and to conceal the real ...”

“... news when they bombed Baghdad. I have been thinking about it because, this morning, I was woken by the sound of a pneumatic drill. When I looked out, there was a film crew on the street, two floors down. And when I switched on the radio they were bombing Yugoslavia, not Belgrade, but somewhere out of sight (though it is hard to tell from the radio). They ...”

“... becomes a refrain in Spike Lee’s new movie, Inside Man, where it is ludicrously literalised by the attempt of a bin Laden nephew to purchase an apartment in Manhattan, and grimly moralised in the story of an American banker who made a fortune by trading with the Nazis, and indeed ...”

“... I was on a Norfolk high, Always convinced that inside the next protesting church door Would be a piece of shattered fretwork to put even Trunch in the shade, Or a Dance of Death more desperate than Sparham’s. The three kids had put up with me as the hours went by. Many a major prize had been offered, for the first ...”

“... on 6 May, during which results continued to trickle in. Labour was expected to lose the Hartlepool by-election, but the margin of its defeat, announced in the early hours, set the story of a ‘heartlands catastrophe’ rolling. Ben Houchen’s crushing Conservative victory in the Tees Valley mayoralty and, later, the loss of scads of council seats – sending ...”

“... And the story is still told of the historian working in the state archives who was surprised to be asked to take tea with the Governor. His Excellency wanted reassurance that he was not chasing convict ancestors among Tasmania’s leading families. Yet the occasion of Conrad’s suggestion belied the observation. Down Home, in which Conrad recorded his ...”

“... for his family, his ‘meteoric rise into respectability and affluence’, followed, of course, by his spectacular fall (linked, in Dickensian or Trollopian fashion, both to sexual profligacy and to speculation on the railways). The story is based on a true case, that of Charles Warde, and incorporates documentary passages from legal proceedings and ...”

“... For reasons which are obscure. 1989-90 seem to be the years in which mega-books of history, none them less than six hundred pages, have become best-sellers: for example, Simon Schama’s Citizens, Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland. Jonathan Spence’s Search for Modern China. And now here comes another one, 813 pages of it, which is virtually certain also to be a best-seller, at least in Britain ...”

“... in which they put their beliefs into practice, have a special interest to anybody who is baffled by the behaviour of the Thirties intelligentsia. Yet despite this rush of information, Sylvia Townsend Warner remains rather mysterious, possibly because she thought women in general were or ought to be so. Candid and ...”

“... was fond of complaining of her guignon, her implacable bad luck. The whole world would have to be overturned, she would say, before her evil star ceased its persecution. There is something in what she says, for she certainly had an excessively chequered life and managed to survive rather impressively. Still, the vast success of the Letters, her first ...”

“... Baghdad, commemorating the deaths of Iraqi soldiers in their war against Iran, and I was escorted by smart Arabs in olive-green uniforms, much like the ‘jungle green’ I wore, thirty years ago, as a National Serviceman dropping in on Aden and Port Said, on the way to the New Territories of China. This state occasion was alarming to me. I had flown into ...”

“... Oliver Cromwell opened a conference summoned ‘to consider of proposals in behalf of the JEWS, by Menasseh ben Israel, an agent come to London in behalf of many of them, to live and trade here, and desiring to have free use of their synagogues’. This gathering of politicians, clergymen, lawyers and merchants, which is known to history as the Whitehall ...”

“... David Peace’s first novel, Nineteen Seventy Four (1999), was set in West Yorkshire in the year of its title, and presented that time and place in apocalyptic terms. ‘These are violent bloody times, son,’ a senior policeman tells the narrator, a gauche young journalist investigating the disappearance of a series of girls ...”

“... Their resolve fortified by the sturdy civic virtue of Cato and Brutus, and their idea of republican self-government indebted to Greco-Roman models, the founders of American independence deferred to the authority of the ancients, even as they embarked on a revolutionary political experiment. George Washington, for example, identified himself with Cato of Utica, whom the 18th-century British knew best through the medium of Addison’s popular tragedy Cato (1713 ...”

“... played to a maximum of three hundred spectators per performance. Boyd’s Tamburlaine was mounted by the Theatre for a New Audience at the Polonsky Shakespeare Centre in Brooklyn, which also has a capacity of three hundred. The Royal Shakespeare Company has staged a string of Marlowe productions over the last decade – Justin Audibert’s Jew of Malta ...”