“... 1895 were busy for Oscar Wilde. In late January he was in Algiers with Alfred Douglas. He wrote to Robert Ross: ‘There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke ...”

“... Hump’ as Bloomsberries called her, was 11 years older than Julia. The astonishing success of Robert Elsmere (1888) made her the second most famous woman in Victorian England. Her poignant saga of a young Anglican priest who defects from the Church to rediscover God in the slums of London sold by the hundred thousand in Britain. In America, unprotected by ...”

“... Oxford, and ends with his valedictory in 1989 – all writings firmly historiographical. But one may easily detect the influence of his engagement in the contemporary war/peace debates in Howard’s treatment of the past: he writes of the decisions of 1914 or 1939 as the disabused observer of current policy-making, and with a sense of urgency that reflects ...”

“... rest of us have to make our neuroses fit in with the world around us – a touch of reality that may trim our unreason. The rich are different from us not just because they can afford to indulge their madnesses, but because they can pay other people to sustain their nightmares. This is a practical, rather than a moral point, and not one made by Charles ...”

“... heavily at lunchtime and fell asleep during afternoon meetings; he liked to play with guns; after Robert Kennedy ordered a halt to all operations against Cuba during the missile crisis Harvey sent in teams of agents; once in an office discussion he pulled a 45, pointed it at someone who disagreed with him, and released the safety catch. This nutcase held ...”

“... pregnancy (she is 37 – much too old in Adrian’s eyes even to be thinking of having children) may have been caused by George Mole or by Lucas. Doreen Slater (‘Stick Insect’) is certainly pregnant by George Mole. By the end of the second book Adrian has witnessed his sister’s – half sister’s? – birth, a death and a cremation. He has taken his ...”

“... of course, as Foreign Minister after the Argentines invaded the Falklands in April 1982. The book may sell: but not to Lord Carrington. Mrs Thatcher’s England is also the theme of a curious book written by Count Filo della Torre, the London correspondent of the newspaper La Repubblica. It is a labour of love. The third book is another of Cosgrave’s ...”

“... just been a nuisance to him. However, in 1932, he got to know the young, beautiful and dotty Robert Heber Percy, otherwise known as ‘the Mad Boy’, for whom he fell and who became a fixture in his household, eventually inheriting Berners’s estate. ‘No one,’ Mark Amory writes, ‘could liberate Berners himself at this stage, but Heber Percy ...”

“... of skinShe is left ‘holding water, feeling nothing’.The anaesthetised slice under water which may end it all is a Robertson signature moment. He often writes as though a poetic image itself has an anaesthetising effect. A poem gruesomely entitled ‘The Halving’ relates having open heart surgery, and ‘A&E’ describes a visit to Casualty afterwards ...”

“... with the Japanese-American family cannot all be Japanese-Americans. Indeed, part of the point may be to redress a kind of ignorance other than that of the historical events themselves, which, despite the publisher’s claim that Otsuka’s book explores ‘unfamiliar’ history, are well documented. Not only has there been extensive historical ...”

“... dressing up futility as something else. In her other novels, McDermott tends to argue for what Robert Frost called the need to be versed in country things: the need to understand the indifference of a world that appears to mourn with us. Like Frost, she implies that the best we can do is exploit our own capacity for indifference: ‘They, since they were ...”

“... and many ingenious devices. Some of these – like filling a fifth of the book with pictures – may strike purists as cheating. But couching each chapter as a literary essay is definitely a good idea, since quotation, especially of poetry, takes up a lot of space. So do capsule biography and paraphrase; de Botton generates almost four pages by rearranging ...”

“... agenda? Do you still do candles for your birthday?’ Some of the questions, then, may be straightforwardly answered, but many don’t really allow for articulated response: they urge reflection, invite imaginative excursions or set up covert statements, permitting simply agreement or dissent. This is not (for the most part) what could be ...”

“... reduce the devout life to moralising calculation and safe asceticism’. A string of other shifts may be mooted: the emergence as a distinctive Jesuit characteristic of systematic hostility to all forms of Protestantism, which had not been in the original brief; the passage from the intellectual anti-humanism promoted by Ignatius in Paris to the classical ...”

“... Faced with the average book of modern literary criticism, the reviewer may wisely resolve to say nothing about the author’s skills as a writer of prose. If they ever existed, they would very likely have been dissembled, for many now believe that to write well is to act in bad faith, even to risk the charge of fascism ...”