“... and who recognised what was best in himself only for long enough to write it down and then cross it out. There is some truth in some of this, but not much. Tasso’s poem is a Christian epic, and it is both Christian and epic in ways that make life particularly difficult for itself. It does not proceed on the assumption that worship of a Christian god ...”

“... Revealed) and maps (Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel). Book history doesn’t just cross disciplines, it mixes media. But it would be unfair to ask one volume to circumscribe what’s not really a ‘field’ so much as a junction. Pity the scholar torn (in Robert Darnton’s words) between ‘collating editions, compiling statistics, decoding ...”

“... a series of focus groups run by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation every year, in which representative cross-sections of society identify a reasonable household budget: carpets and tiles, sofas, lampshades, toasters, microwaves, mobile phones, babysitting and childcare are all seen as necessary if household members are ‘to participate in society’. Poverty has ...”

“... of a neutral expert,’ he says, ‘would not necessarily deprive the parties of the right to cross-examine, or even to call their own experts in addition to the neutral expert if that were justified by the scale of the case.’ Such a compromise is inevitably imperfect. There have in the past been in some medical specialities (obstetrics and orthopaedics ...”

“... while we are working together.’ Edward gives more of this – Churchill’s goading notes to Anthony Eden in particular. The trouble is that now – for the period April, May, June 1944 – when one wants most detail, it disappears. Frank’s letters have ceased, Kenneth Scott’s equipment has fallen in the river, Bulgarian archives are closed to ...”

“... by their uneasy and ambiguous homosexuality. For Mann being German came first, and he learned, as Anthony Heilbut rather quaintly puts it, to read German history as one long queer epic – he alluded to Frederick the Great’s homosexuality and depicted Bismarck as ‘hysterical and high-pitched’. When considering literary history, he enjoyed ...”

“... in the preparations for the King’s coronation but walked into Better Books in the Charing Cross Road and discovered George Barker’s poetry. Then and there she decided to annex him, to become poet and lover at one go, as her namesake Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice decides to annex Darcy, since ‘to be mistress of Pemberly might be ...”

“... had to be good’. But ‘good’ isn’t good enough as a category.) Last year’s promotion of Anthony Burgess to official Grand Old Man was a case in point. After years of getting respectful, rather than ecstatic reviews, and of writing the sort of books which perhaps aren’t naturally suited to the British book-reader, Burgess suddenly turns 70 and ...”

“... centre-left activists – Neal Lawson is the latest on the chopping block – for countenancing cross-party co-operation.Everyone agrees that Starmer puts victory ahead of any political commitment: power, he says, is the ‘object of the exercise’. His diagnosis of Labour’s failures goes beyond claiming that the party fails adequately to reflect its ...”

“... props in the Ken Tynan legend assembly-kit, along with the Mickey Mouse watch and effete-aesthete Anthony Blanche outfits he wore at Oxford, and, later, the poolstick collection of headmaster’s canes he kept handy to beat women’s bottoms. The cigarettes eventually killed him, but it is only with one in his hand that he looks fully activated, in ...”

“... Inmates make regular return visits to the old dwelling, rather like the returning dead in Anthony Minghella’s film Truly, Madly, Deeply. The ghosts’ favourite video was Brief Encounter, which they watched so often that they all knew the dialogue by heart and couldn’t resist mouthing it ahead of the actors. Their shepherd from beyond (Alan ...”

“... circumstances, their place is taken by a security-cleared counsel instructed by the court, who cross-examines the witnesses and generally assists the court to test the strength of the state’s case. I believe this oversimplified the position in Canada, where there has been a considerable volume of litigation in relation to closed material. Be that as it ...”

“... in the Baltic in 1368, probably at the siege of the Lithuanian stronghold of New Kaunas, was Sir Anthony de Lucy the Younger. He was returned for burial to a comparably bleak shore in a western land far away where paganism was long extinct, in his family’s little priory church at St Bees in Cumbria. The wrapping in lead of de Lucy’s body in Lithuania ...”

“... in A Whistling Woman’s own symbolic repertoire. (As she did in Babel Tower, where she brought on Anthony Burgess as a witness for the defence in her fictional obscenity trial, Byatt enjoys mixing real people with her imaginary ones, even as she accords some of the latter the extended life of characters in Balzac: another episode of Through the Looking-Glass ...”

“... Foxe’s Book of Martyrs to the Book of Common Prayer. Suggestive and rarely predictable, these cross-cuttings place even the most familiar texts in a new light. One of the anthology’s most dense introductory essays, on the ‘small compass and tight formal constraints’ of the sonnet, could apply equally well to its own powers of compression. Rule-bound ...”