“... man. A book, In the Wake of a Deadad, would emerge. Even silence – Paul Auster, Dinos Chapman, Richard Wentworth – would be published. ‘No reply’ becomes part of the texture, along with hesitations, prevarications, confessions. Many of the respondents turn Kötting’s challenge back on themselves: their refusal to look into the eyes of a lifeless ...”

“... makes his favourite writers sound rather like a squad of marines, or weekend hikers. Writing about Richard Eberhart in 1960, for example, he claimed that ‘Eberhart ... is a prolific writer, so the metaphysical pieces may merely be poetic callisthenics to keep him fit until his next burst of creative energy.’ Of Hugh MacDiarmid in 1962: ‘He has managed a ...”

“... shots for the South Bank Show, ‘smiling, simpering, giggling, looking down at his nails’. Richard Harris at the Savoy in 1990, ‘playing pocket billiards’ through his tracksuit bottoms. Rafael Nadal in Rome in 2011, ‘lying on a massage table with his flies undone, affording me a good view of his Armani underpants – Armani being one of his many ...”

“... its nervous system. Monomania as a shorthand method of characterisation has a long history in English fiction, but traditionally it has been used for comic minor characters with no inner life: Thwackum and Square in Tom Jones, say, or Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion. McEwan’s new novel, Solar, unlike any of his previous work, is avowedly comic. And much ...”

“... and under a braying donkey, a practice that continued well into the Tudor period. The schooling of English physicians in the Middle Ages was performed in close conjunction with the Church. Only Oxford and Cambridge had medical schools. The training took between six and nine years, involved placements in Salerno and Paris, and incorporated not just ...”

“... as they haven’t been seen before, detecting unnoticed aspects by unexpected comparisons. Its English practitioners include Cotton and Marvell, whose ‘Upon Appleton House’ ought to be acknowledged as a Martian ancestor. The New Right, the Falklands, the rejection of Modernism, ‘the impoverishment of national culture’, as the admired Peter Ackroyd ...”

“... in the worst fears of his mother, it is only he who can ever enunciate (for once, in ‘normal’ English) the adultery of his father. Only he manages to offer any hope of comfort to his aunt, lost in apparently inconsolable grief at the recent death of her son. And in doing this he serves to call into question all our certainties about good ...”

“... on the intransigence that slowly and bitterly infects participants in long-running disputes. The English bishops appear as neither heroes nor villains, but as men whose office placed them between the hammer and anvil of a governmental system at war with itself. We see the vulnerability of the political dissident in exile when Henry II succeeds in getting ...”

“... the toad-like Mayer, he was tall and good-looking, with enthralling black eyes, so in his classy English suits and bright yellow car he could be his own leading man, the irresistible, sophisticated, cosmopolitan figure that poor boys in Lvov might dream of becoming. To complete the romantic picture, he suffered from TB. Garbo said he was a sensitive director ...”

“... ruled by what was usually the least abusive type of occupation regime, a military government. As Richard Cobb has told us, the governor, General von Falkenhausen, was happy enough in Brussels to return there in 1952 to marry his Belgian mistress. Falkenhausen’s assistant, General Reeder, who conducted day-to-day affairs, was a reasonably correct ...”

“... Rather than cataloguing the achievements of the ‘Oxbridge sporting gents’ who dominated English natural history in the 1830s, and who have subsequently preoccupied historians of 19th-century biology, Desmond excavates the ‘radical underworld’ of science, and in particular of medicine. The inhabitants of this subterranean realm constituted a ...”

“... refereeing blunders. At the same time, neither would be there without flashes of wondrously un-English brilliance from Zola and Juninho. These players – Zola for Chelsea, Juninho for Middlesbrough – have injected a new interest into our post-Gascoigne soccer scene, a new possibility of unexpectedness. Would we have loved them, though, if they had ...”

“... of the picture of schizophrenia which he presents, influenced in part by Alasdair Mac-Intyre and Richard Rorty, who themselves are transmitting a message from the hermeneutic writers Grünbaum attacks in his long introduction. His aim is to insist, without denying inherited dispositions, biochemical imbalances, and occasionally inescapable destinies, that ...”

“... vanguard of reform, many of Arran’s critics believed he was sabotaging the whole structure of English society. ARRAN HOMO was regularly painted in large red letters on walls outside his London clubs, and human excrement arrived along with the hate mail. Miss B., his secretary, opened these packages. Refusing to let Boofy see one pile, she said she had ...”

“... in his desires. He is sincere when he lectures or comforts other rulers, when he suggests to Richard Nixon that he should come to Uganda to recuperate after Watergate, when he congratulates Mrs Thatcher on her fresh, charming and attractive appearance in her victory photographs. Her election as Tory leader exercises his mind, and the fall of Mr Heath is ...”