“... outright mimicry further dissolve the boundaries between these killers. Jack Owen Spillman began reading about Bundy when he moved to Tacoma as a boy, and later adopted him as a role model. With so many of them in business at the same time, it became hard for investigators to be sure which butcher was responsible for which newly discovered corpse, and in ...”

“... Labour Party figures. One of these pieces had come in and been edited by Mary-Kay, and Karl was reading it in proof. ‘Johnson is like some beast from the pampas,’ Karl said, admiringly and amusedly, ‘who’s brought in, and immediately rushes around butting everybody.’ No such animal is known to zoology, and Bill Johnson has no known connection with ...”

“... in static numerical patterns. This concentration, however, is the quality we consume in our unique reading, and which has no real equivalent in The Tin Drum, say, or Gravity’s Rainbow, or Midnight’s Children, even though their momentum is analogous, as are the associations from which their episodes are constructed. We have no ready-made literary-technical ...”

“... of its politics and examines its weaknesses. Both books will be painful and often infuriating reading for anyone who was at all sympathetic to these politics, but Jones has the harder task: to assess the failure of a project he championed, in which he was a significant player, and which depended on the work and was damaged by the flaws of people he is ...”

“... knowing even the most elementary facts about the intelligence services their taxes pay for. The Peter Wright trial in Australia has recently brought out the full absurdity of this, with Sir Robert Armstrong attempting at one point to suggest that the very existence of MI5 and MI6 (let alone the identity of their directors) was a secret which could neither ...”

“... bodies could not be reassembled, bones picked from the mud. ‘The government of the time,’ Peter Ashley wrote in his English Heritage booklet, Lest We Forget (2004), ‘refused to acknowledge the concept of the repatriation of the dead, so these monuments became the focal points for grief.’ The fallen of King’s Cross are uniformly capitalised: a ...”

“... Emil DuBois-Reymond. As for making his living, he ultimately settled on psychiatry after reading in Krafft-Ebing’s textbook that it was a field where theory still bore the personal stamp of the author. Jung arrived at the Burghölzli hospital on 10 December 1900. Thus began what could have been the greatest psychiatric career of the 20th ...”

“... of the genre prohibit it, and accordingly he goes round in the eminently non-Beckettian circle of reading the work off from the life and the life off from the work. The game is not worth the candle; there is nothing in any way remarkable about its resuits, apart perhaps from their often flagrantly self-contradictory character: for example, Knowlson reminds us ...”

“... regretted that I failed in those laborious 473 pages to grasp Orwell’s character as well as Mr Peter Lewis did in his recent and sprightly picture book (which, incidentally, largely reflected Sonia’s view of the true George, though no reviewers noticed this). Perhaps so. I’m only irritated that Koestler failed to notice why I was so explicitly ...”

“... Bailey’s England, First and Last is a book for future social historians as well as nostalgic reading for his contemporaries. Nine years younger, I grew up in what used to be Surrey, and Bailey’s evocation of the minutiae of post-war life in the Home Counties gives me a not wholly pleasant feeling of being sucked back into my own childhood. Windfall ...”

“... his life to maim//Himself somehow for the job,’ he wrote in a posthumous address to the painter Peter Lanyon. Apart from a brief and incongruous spell as an advertising copywriter and the occasional stint on fishing boats, he refused to succumb to the distraction of a day job; he didn’t write reviews or journalism; and as his books of verse were very far ...”

“... the actor is the same, Rudolf Klein-Rogge.By 1933 Lang had made his first sound film, M, with Peter Lorre as the child murderer who is caught and tried by criminals rather than cops: the trouble he is causing is bad for business, and the criminals are also full of moral indignation. The film’s original title was Murderer among Us, and the story goes ...”

“... to appear to be setting the terms of the dispute. She remained reliant on her energy secretary, Peter Walker, whom she didn’t trust and feared would do ‘a fudge, like Pym and the Foreign Office in the Falklands had tried to do’. But unlike Pym, Walker kept his job, because she didn’t dare sack him. In some respects her role in the miners’ strike ...”

“... by a scholar leans towards ‘the Muse’ and away from the facts of History. There is a sense (as Peter Ackroyd cogently observed in his Life of Eliot) in which every literary biography is something of a tightrope-walk between these two poles: a sense in which, that is, all biographies are really re-interpretations on the part of each individual biographer of ...”

“... less than three months earlier by mutual friends in Oxford, where Eliot had been spending the year reading in the Bodleian and working on his Harvard doctoral dissertation in philosophy. At the time, Vivienne was a governess in Cambridge. Her family lived prosperously in London, largely off her mother’s properties in Ireland. Her father, of whom she was ...”