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“... by changing hands privately. I thought this was common knowledge but in Sotheby’s: Bidding for Class Robert Lacey assures us that there had never been a ‘tradition of selling ... classic, museum-quality masterpieces at auction – at Christie’s or anywhere else’ before the end of the First World War, when ...”

“... In American Pastoral, the protagonist’s daughter ‘is chaos itself’; protesting the Vietnam War, she visits ruin on her family’s suburban paradise with an act of murderous violence. And in I Married a Communist, Roth’s most recent novel, the three protagonists of the book’s venomous revenge drama are all at the mercy of their escalating and rather ...”

“... but the effort is worthwhile. His advice extends to such fields as politics, economics and war: this scope gives some clue both to the structure and to the theme of Stolen Lightning. This is not a book that describes magic – Paul Daniels and his friends in the Magic Circle can rest easy. Instead, it is a book that celebrates a kind of magic, the ...”

“... except that much of it (apart from the artistic stigma) was the common lot of many middle-class late Victorians, not all of whom became as bigoted and malevolent as he did. Gilmour thinks he was a child of his time in the 1890s and early 1900s, who then failed to change with the times; but in fact he was always out of place. It is arguable that he was ...”

“... Plainly, it would have been impossible for the Irish to maintain their neutrality during the war had the ports stayed in British hands. Less plainly, the surrender of the ports reinforced the importance, in strategic terms, of Northern Ireland remaining under effective British control. Churchill, who had been curiously unemphatic about the ports in ...”

“... created a ‘libertarian fiscal policy which would in the end bring increased affluence to every class in society and thus relax the tensions which in the hungry 1830s and 40s threatened revolution in Britain’. Disraeli was the dreamer and the word-smith, Peel the doer. Both men achieved notable changes in the interests of the nation and of social ...”

“... a strong feeling for Stephen Haggard’s novel Nya, which he happened to find a copy of during the war, and which he feels to be a forerunner of Lolita, giving sound professional reasons why Lolita won out and Nya vanished into limbo. What really matters, I suspect, is that Nya is for him something to hold onto, like the novels of Edward Upward, which he also ...”

“... bolos, babas and piles of golden patisseries. This is like the jewelled prose of the upper-class English traveller, carried to the threshhold of burlesque – and maybe across it, to produce a variety of Camp. On the Black Hill has its feasts too: ‘There were rolls of spiced beef, a cold roast turkey, polonies, brawns, pork pies and three Wye ...”

“... of exploration that began in the mid-19th century and ended at the beginning of the First World War. Explorers of any age are likely to be enveloped in romantic haze, but during that period they seemed almost superhuman. Nineteenth-and early 20th-century exploration was a highly competitive and widely publicised enterprise: the search for the headwaters of ...”

“... a master of opposition tactics both inside and outside the House of Commons. Waging a spectacular war on two fronts, he attacked the Gladstone Government and his own Front Bench with equal vigour. His barnstorming tours of the country and constant manipulation of the press marked him out as a new species of demagogue appealing to the mass electorate created ...”

“... His father was on the trams, but did rather better at illegal bookmaking. They were Irish, working-class, lapsed Catholics. Sidney left school at 14 and spent his late teens in irregular employment and part-time art education. He could not draw well enough for Mr Leyshon-White’s commercial art agency, so he ran the correspondence course. He enjoyed writing ...”

“... stage further, by writing it in verse. Her detective heroine, Jill Fitzpatrick, is a gay, working-class former cop, who narrates in a hyperactive free-form skitter: Always this  I’ll ring you crap Sure, I say. Sure  because I don’t want to hassle sure  because she’s married sure  because something’s better than nothing Fitzpatrick’s lexicon is ...”

“... to pursue in minute detail topics as untrendy as the doctrinal disputes of pre-First World War socialists or the social and economic consequences of the Black Plague. That she has escalated her demands during the last twenty years while enlarging the circle of her readers suggests that she is a woman of distinctive talents. Ideally, a consideration of ...”

“... the children of academics, but the degree to which it mitigates the cultural disadvantages of class. It delivers proficiency for all, in the manner of accredited driving lessons. But that implies a minimisation of risk-taking and the establishment of acceptable margins for error. This is an injunction against creative interpretation and writing, a ...”

“... has made possible a mutual East-West re-examination of the twists and turns in the record of Cold War conflict and confrontation. Last February, for example, there was a gathering in Moscow of top-level participants in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, from both the White House and the Kremlin: they were meeting to discuss how those events unfolded in each ...”