“... by God that was how he shone and there was no spotlight or anything,’ Mann said. ‘It was so white it was electrifying.’ The Cid was death itself, waging war.The story, first written down in the 13th century, appears to have originated at the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña, which received Rodrigo’s cadaver. In the days leading up to his ...”

“... of the wistfulness and nostalgia that pervaded his previous book, this one was reminiscent of William Faulkner in his demonic vein. Employing several narrators, including ventriloquised historical figures, it told of a criminal gang that set slaves free, only to capture them again for profit. Lowboy, set in present-day New York, describes the disturbing ...”

“... metafiction are still strongly influenced by the 1960s: John Barth, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, William Gass. Thanks to the work of this group and the self-named characters of Philip Roth, we might well brace ourselves for archness or emotional coolness (rather than sincerity, warmth and optimistic political engagement) at the first sign of a ...”

“... and had been since 1939, when he invented the pocket (as distinct from the strip) cartoon for the William Hickey column in the Daily Express. He drew more than ten thousand of them over the next forty years and his characters, especially Maudie, Countess of Littlehampton, Mrs Frogmarch the Tory lady and Canon Fontwater, played out the range of topical ...”

“... approval when Michelle Obama presented the Best Picture award live from the Diplomatic Room of the White House. In Iran itself, however, the film was less well received. Despite an opening sequence that apologetically acknowledged CIA involvement in an earlier operation – the 1953 coup against the nationalist prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, which many ...”

“... the former secretary of state, one of the begetters of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war; William Perry, the former US secretary of defence; James Mattis, Trump’s future first secretary of defence, who thought that Theranos blood tests would be a ‘game changer’ in battlefield medicine. Naturally, all those men would be useful when it came to ...”

“... of North America. Cook’s journals and the reports of other enlightened travellers, including William Marsden’s History of Sumatra (1783) and Arthur Young’s studies of French agriculture (1787-89), were intended as major contributions to knowledge. Marsden’s work was inspired by his regular attendance at the Royal Society’s ‘philosophical ...”

“... like the walls of Kabul, made of warm, sagging, straw-flecked mud: they are rigid blocks of grey-white stone. Foreigners have consistently perceived this aspect of the city as – in the words of the French gem-hunter Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in 1640 – ‘not very handsome’, or, in the words of Bartholomew Plaisted in 1752, ‘very disagreeable to ...”

“... where he encountered modern art in the form of pictures by Gauguin, Wilson Steer, Augustus John, William Nicholson, and woodcuts by Kandinsky, collected by the University’s Vice-Chancellor. Frank Rutter, curator of Leeds Art Gallery, completed the boy’s artistic education. He had already begun to write poems, in free verse influenced by Imagism. Now he ...”

“... and reducing her, at least temporarily, to a meekly spousal role. Graves, for whom Riding was the White Goddess – ‘she was his muse and he loved her and abandoned himself to her,’ as one of the other disciples touchingly remarked towards the end – would have been horrified by such an outcome. But perhaps she secretly hankered for such a ...”

“... at Reykjavik ‘resembled as nothing else the 1905 meeting between Tsar Nicholas II and Kaiser William II’. But the real difficulty is that to get at the kind of answers a historian of the Cold War now requires calls for access to the Russian archives. Before the war ended it was reasonable to act as if that day would never come. Now, to everyone’s ...”

“... literary opinions are just as forcefully expressed. There is a long list of enthusiasms: for William Howells and Ulysses S. Grant, for Logan Pearsall Smith, Frederick Prokosch, Edith Wharton, Leonardo Sciascia, Thomas Love Peacock and Henry Miller: ‘If he often sounded like the village idiot, that was because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the ...”

“... living room. ‘I’m biting the baby,’ he said. ‘D’ you want to?’ The baby was lying on a white towelling nappy and Moggie was bent over her, biting her arms and then her legs and then the cheeks of her face. He said he did it all the time and that the baby liked it. He said it was like tickling. I didn’t want to do it but said I’d stay and ...”

“... Books’, ‘Stories 1900-1939’ and so on – splendidly produced, with colour and black-and-white illustrations, and giving a good indication of what’s been available at various moments during this interesting period. We have only to glance at the catalogue to see how the Edwardian idea of manliness was purveyed for adolescent boys (‘A Lad of ...”

“... story of the fall in paradise, and rewrites it in the bleakest terms. This is a book that makes William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the most eminent of its literary forefathers, look like a study in innocence – perhaps because its undeviating gaze focuses on Eve, not Adam. Like Atwood, Wiggins places her fall in remembered history. Charlotte and ...”