“... reminded her of Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities, the old lady who sits and knits while the French Revolution rages, a list of targets to be guillotined concealed in her long scarf.A narrative history like this book, focused on a few exemplary figures, is vivid and easy to grasp. You can imagine yourself in the characters’ position: what would I have ...”

“... Around the base crouch four chained figures representing the major battles Nelson won against the French: Cape St Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar. The figures do not look like Africans, but they are black, they are manacled and I was not the only child in Liverpool who took them to be slaves.This mistake was actually an insight, because the ...”

“... of wool for £210. Like the glover’s paring-knife, these ‘tods’ (a unit equivalent to 28 lb) resurface in a play-text – this time in The Winter’s Tale, where a shepherd struggles to reckon up the value of a shearing: ‘every ’leven wether tods; every tod yields pound and odd shilling; fifteen hundred shorn, what comes the wool to?’ By my ...”

“... He also took against the Corsicans, who combined ‘the worst qualities of the Italians and the French’. Later, when he was nearly forty and owned a house in Verbier, he delivered his opinion on the Swiss, or, as he put it, ‘the goddam Swiss’: they were, he wrote, ‘the ugliest race alive’. Truman Capote, in his letters, made many judgments. He ...”

“... in his office and in the same way the pupils of another candidate for secular sainthood, the French philosopher Simone Weil, saw to it that their adored teacher did not suffer the consequences of a practical un-wisdom even more hopeless than Kafka’s. One cannot say that Kafka’s marvelling at mundane accomplishments was not genuine, was a ploy. The ...”

“... idea for Death Comes for the Archbishop came to Cather one evening when they were staying at the La Fonda Hotel in downtown Santa Fe. Cather herself said that ‘before morning, the story was in my mind. The way of it was on the white wall of that hotel room … as if it were all in order and colour there, projected by a sort of magic lantern.’ The book ...”

“... it featured Hamlet, dated from a decade or more earlier; it seems to have taken its events from a French prose narrative of the 1570s, which itself translated and adapted a Norse legend embedded in Saxo Grammaticus’s 13th-century Danish History. The original Norse legend is very brutal and very bloody. The further source or impulse of Elizabethan revenge ...”

“... published in newspapers and magazines. She had worked ‘in service’, including as a maid to Katherine Mansfield’s grandmother. Frame’s father was a railway worker of Scottish origin, who fished, did embroidery and bagpiped the children to sleep. There were five children, and Janet came in the middle, the survivor of a pair of twins. The Frames owned ...”

“... adept at Internet navigation – ever Googles me and sees what I’m writing now, I doubt if she’ll be pleased.Some of my liking, I confess, arises from sheer Southern California white trash fellow feeling. Pepper was born near Los Angeles and spent most of his rackety life (as I have) on the West Coast. His father was a shipyard worker and nasty ...”