“... the first five years of my life I barely knew where my father was or who he was.’ In the stern but witty Connor household both of his parents were reckoned to be faulty. The absentee father, though, came in for the greater weight of disapproval. The aunts thought him a bohemian, a drifter, a bad lot. And when Karl was caught looking a bit ...”

“... cracks. The setting is the West, and a walk-on character claims to be descended from one of the James brothers: but it is a thoroughly modern West, a litter of drugs, divorce and brand names. Its capitals are Reno, Oakland, Portland; the saloons have become suburbs; the cattle trail is a deserted highway. The title story, ‘We find ourselves in ...”

“... out the physical equivalents of Podsnappery here, but insofar as the image is hairy, dingy and stern it is that of the Victorian worthy. The pictures in Dr Davies’s book tell the dispiriting story of the rapid, wholesale Victorian takeover of male dress and demeanour. In 1830 and even 1840 Maclise has Forster as a nonchalant but sensuous young ...”

“... Welsh corgi. The name of this dratted animal is Edward. Edward will respond to nothing but the stern tone in the voice of Muriel Pritchett, a scatty dog-trainer with artificially frizzy hair and a thrift-shop outfit. Thus, we have a couple of archetypal scene-stealers – dog lady and dog – and the slightly stuffy accomplice needed to set them off. It ...”

“... He belonged, by natural kinship, in the company of high-art writers like Flaubert, Proust and James (or, as he contended for a while, Edith Sitwell, Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf), and therefore he could scarcely be expected to function at the same level as industrious pen-pushers like, say, Bennett or Galsworthy. He would much rather talk Proust over ...”

“... Chronicle, the Annual Register and two West Country newspapers, with an occasional glance at James Fenimore Cooper’s history of the US Navy. The craft involved range from men-of-war and merchantmen to schooners, jollyboats and even small pleasure-craft, the capsizing of which would not normally count as shipwrecks. The author is not concerned with the ...”

“... field.Only eight years before, the high master of the fee-paying Manchester Grammar School, Eric James, had argued against greater social mobility as an educational objective, writing in the Guardian that ‘we must recognise with greater frankness the facts of human inequality.’ True, he admitted, children at academically selective (as well as ...”

“... It is the book which sowed the seed for John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, for Indiana Jones and James Bond, and though less slick than its successors, its anxieties and lunacies are more interesting. It isn’t suitable for children; perhaps not suitable at all.As a child Henry Rider Haggard was believed to be stupid: his father told him he was destined to ...”

“... housewife and mother, who chants the Koran in Arabic, a language she doesn’t know, and whose stern prohibitions, emerging from a profound fear of the outside world, have damaged many lives, including her own children’s. Here, Aslam describes her laboriously picking up the prayer beads she scattered when she slapped her daughter during an ...”

“... architectural policy of the next British monarch, as well as of the current mayor of Rome. Robert Stern, once a board member of the Disney Corporation, now dean of Yale’s School of Architecture and the author of the introduction to Krier’s latest book, is the architect of the presidential library of George W. Bush, now under construction in Texas. And ...”

“... the books are not shallow or perfunctory. And yet the impression they leave isn’t of a stern confrontation with the worst. They sidestep that: they almost seem, for all the research and the heaped-up detail, to sidestep realism altogether. Ondaatje doesn’t flinch – in Anil’s Ghost especially – from horrors, but his stories have something ...”

“... he only got around to a gas-bomb fiction, and that a disconcertingly spry one, the poem “James Honeyman” ... in August 1937 when already the national gas-bomb obsession was fading and being displaced by the more realistic concern with high explosive.’ Revealingly of what? Even if a writer’s nightmares are to be judged by their exact degree of ...”

“... in the Promised Land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, ‘to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. While nurturing the ‘national home’, a term as deliberately vague as Palestinian ‘autonomy’ is today, Britain ...”

“... Castle, a plain inscription remembering him as ‘Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Councillor to King James, and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney’. Greville’s life of Sidney, written in the earlier part of James’s reign, is a study in failure. ‘He never was magistrate, nor possessed of any fit stage for eminence to act ...”

“... as well as on the Languet-Sidney correspondence and other letters secured by the private scholar James Osborn and published in his Young Philip Sidney (1972). Sidney’s life was a warp of virtue woven onto the woof of fortune. It was one of history’s ironies that Philip II of Spain was his godfather, and gave him his name. His fortune was to be a ...”