“... boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space ...”

“... Yoshi kept coming to mind as I puzzled, eased, or intermittently ground and grinned my way through Michael Westlake’s 51 Soko – an ingenious, teasing, complex, at times impenetrable, often brilliantly parodic book, with a title that reads disconcertingly like a personal number-plate or a cosmetic preparation (‘51 Soko for firmer follicles’). It may be ...”

“... James – or rather, given the horror of much of what happens later, the atmosphere of a Stephen King who has learned to write like Henry James. ‘It had always been certain to start like this. If he was honest with himself, he had to concede that he had always known it really, at some level ... He thought, correctly as it turned out, that his life was ...”

“... of the title, literally recalling his career as a puppeteer and forgotten director of a lamentable King Lear and a creditable-sounding Cherry Orchard, metaphorically names the show he puts on for 450 pages, cracking up in the wake of the death of his mistress. First she wanted him to go straight, and to sleep with no one else; then it turned out she had ...”

“... subject: ‘“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice. “I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too!”’ We notice that Holt has begun to turn his deep question in an unexpected direction. ‘Why is there something rather than nothing, because there is, and we’d better ...”

“... making things and selling them. Acton’s is a world in which production, commerce and retail were king; everyone participated in a market economy governed by rational invisible laws, with unprecedented material prosperity the result. Athens, thanks to trade, ‘was a place of opportunity’. It welcomed skilled immigrants and fostered expatriate communities ...”

“... for any man. Now I sit and wait for the third’); one German occupation; two royal visits (‘The king looked more serious than his father and when I stood on the edge of the kerb and shouted, “Wharro, George!” he didn’t look round. He didn’t know it was me’); the Muratti Cup (the annual football game against Jersey, like the Harvards against the ...”

“... was always a bothering thing. 1911. Was that the Wexford Lock-Out or the visit of the English king? It was both, but it was never both in Ireland. When Irish weather stepped up to the plate you couldn’t wish to be anywhere else in the world. One of that legion of Irish summer days that let you down after the promise of morning, like betting on ...”

“... about to act in Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night (1952), and Menelaus becomes Arthur Miller, ‘king of Sparta and New York’. He brings Norma Jeane back from whatever war ‘Troy’ represents in the 20th century, only to find she has evaporated, as magical figments should. The non-phantom Norma Jeane, meanwhile, saw no action of any kind since she was ...”

“... and was among those executed after the rebellion. ‘The play,’ he averred, ‘was of King Harry the 4th, and of the killing of King Richard II.’ Third, on 18 February, one of the players, Augustine Phillips, in signed testimony given under oath, described the play as ‘the play of the deposing and killing of ...”

“... friend is ‘an impassioned and eloquent expert’, full of stories about Quetzalcoatl, the god-king who takes the form of a plumed serpent; about wonderful coyotes and jaguars. ‘Mr Palomar’s friend pauses at each stone, transforms it into a cosmic tale, an allegory, a moral reflection.’ At the same time a group of schoolboys is being taken round the ...”

“... good novel of the great age of American paranoia, the age that began just before the Kennedy/King assassinations, and faded away somewhere in the early Nineties. It’s not that the Forties and Fifties didn’t have their paranoias, or that we are short of paranoids now. It’s that people didn’t always believe, and don’t have to believe, that what ...”

“... dispatched, but Cleopatra Selene was raised by Octavian’s sister and eventually married to the king of Mauretania. On 29 August, Octavian became the pharaoh of Egypt.Famous as its dénouement might be, the career of Marcus Antonius is somewhat shadowy. He was born a nobilis, which under the republic meant he had a consul as ancestor: since the expulsion of ...”

“... it had neither a standing army nor a permanent system of taxation to support one. Every time the king wanted to mount a military expedition, which was often, he had to persuade a resistant parliament to levy a new tax. Meanwhile, tremendous power was vested in the landed aristocracy. In a strange anomaly, the realm included three palatinates, territories to ...”

“... Since being acquitted of child molestation charges last summer, Michael Jackson has been hanging out in Bahrain, enjoying the hospitality of the ruler’s poptastic son Sheikh Abdullah. Jackson is said to have become a Muslim (which is sure to please his critics on Good Morning America), but evidence would suggest he has yet to get the hang of Islamic custom ...”