“... of my son,’ Coates said in his acceptance speech for the National Book Award. ‘I can’t go home and tell him that it’s going to be OK … I just don’t have that right, I just don’t have that power.’ The power he does have, the power anyone who is black can have, he decides, is a negative one: it lies in the refusal to buy into the possibility ...”

“... asleep. Tell them I ...’ From her temporary bed-clothed refuge the much-desired Flora could be Lord Jim tailing off into ellipsis, caesura, the cut-off. She could also, of course, be on a page of dotted Irish playfulness by Sterne or Beckett. Banville knows, hereabouts, what his house and lineage are. And his readers should be up on what to expect in the ...”

“... in a fine flurry. So what’s the point of effort in that case? Why didn’t old Roy stay home and write books Instead of pounding through this paper chase, The sweat of which does little for his looks? The bees have got the right approach to space: The moths flap uselessly like fish on hooks ... The tension’s fearful and one feels no better for ...”

“... to make a happy second marriage to Benita Pelly. As well as writing to her daily when absent from home, Brooke also began a diary essentially as a means of communicating with her. Many extracts are quoted, including an arrangement during the phoney war months for each partner to read the same passage in the Bible every day at the same time. In addition, the ...”

“... but romance. Garibaldi’s expedition led to an outburst of enthusiasm from unlikely quarters. Lord Shaftesbury wrote to Cavour in 1860: ‘Your revolution is the most wonderful, the most honourable and the most unexpected manifestation of courage, virtue and self-control the world has ever seen.’ Cavour himself wrote to Durando that ‘the expedition of ...”

“... to sustain the organisation and all its activities without more and more frequent trips to the Home Office for bigger and bigger increases in the licence fee. It was inevitable that sooner or later some government would shout enough. What is perhaps surprising is that an administration so keen to break the old political consensus, so dedicated to reducing ...”

“... exporting papermaking machinery to 56 countries. Hewlett, born in 1874, felt quite at home with the paternalism which could flourish within a firm that remained in the hands of a single family, though he deplored ‘the harder and less human atmosphere’ which came with technological change. He didn’t disdain the Johnson’s dividends he ...”

“... pied piper, or ‘mouse queen’. In fact she loathed mice and had been kept prisoner in her own home by packs of the creatures scurrying around. Sleep was out of the question: as soon as she shut her eyes, the mice would crawl over her. Far from feeding them, she spent her time chasing as many as she could out of her house onto the roof . . . And so ...”

“... carrying rifles and riot shields descended on Columbia Heights, a suburb of Minneapolis. At the home of ChingLy ‘Scott’ Thao, a US citizen, they knocked quickly before shattering the front door with a battering ram. They yanked Thao, who was wearing only bright blue boxers and Crocs, out into the sub-zero cold and bundled him into a black SUV. For about ...”

“... The PLO might recognise Israel. The Poles pretend Walesa’s not in gaol. But history here at home is the two Krays Let out of clink to mourn their saintly mother. The boys for all their rough-and-tumble ways Both loved her as they never loved another. People repaired with grafts, pins, splints and stays Still can’t decide which was the nicer brother ...”

“... as a lush Gainsborough melodrama in 1944, launching the careers of James Mason (the villainous Lord Manderstoke) and Stewart Granger (heroic Harry). The Balliol-educated son of an Oxford don, Sadleir was a publisher with Constable and eventually ran the firm. He was also the greatest Victorian bibliophile of his generation and his collection is now held in ...”

“... the absence of any indication, after they were published, that the deeply studious, concentrated, home-keeping Mrs Lewes was a likely person to have produced their successors. Before the publication of his first book, Continent, in 1986, Jim Crace worked as a freelance features journalist for the Sunday Telegraph. He’d written a few short stories, some ...”

“... even though Leo’s mother had been a Hungarian Jew and Leo himself had been attacked by Lord Haw-Haw as ‘the half-Jew Leopold Amery’. At one stage Jack asserted that the victory of the German armies was ‘necessary in order that small children shall no longer be the victims of the Jews’. He also attempted to recruit British POWs to fight for ...”

“... slogans. More attentive reading, however, revealed that this was poetry: ‘I sing and appeal: Lord, give birth to a calf!’ ‘Look at the fat thighs/Of this obscene wall./Here the nuns at night/Remove Christ’s trousers.’ ‘Citizens, change/The underclothes of your souls!’ These words came courtesy of the Order of Imaginists, a group of ...”

“... who had hoped to take part in the climb, joined the search for the bodies. They never found Lord Francis Douglas. The chaplain decided to bury what there was of the other three in the snow and read over them the 90th Psalm, from a prayer-book found in the pocket of the dead divine, the Rev. Charles Hudson. Unsurprisingly, the Swiss authorities were ...”