“... boarding-school, the boy had virtually no education; his mother preferred to keep him at home to go window-shopping with her, or to the cinema. These were the days of the double-feature, and he saw, he estimates, two hundred films a year. He had a crowd of relatives who are, in his view, spiteful, greedy, stupid and pathetic. They manifested ‘a ...”

“... stopped her: but who? She was beholden to nobody, and that was her proudest boast.’ Now, hearing home-going schoolchildren under the window she ‘squeezed her eyes shut and doubled herself over her knotted arms. It was a good sound ... but it hurt her.’ At 40 she has married ‘a kind and comical man for whom, though she was too distracted to express ...”

“... too. However layered with rocks and earth the roof, however stocked with freeze-drieds (praise the Lord!), however broad the door, how bullet proof, no matter how much water they have stored, until the radiation count all-clear broadcast (they don’t say how) on radio, when they can, but cautiously, then reappear, death got there before them, though they grow ...”

“... and late in action at Tunis and La Goleta. And en route to this Court with letters from my lord Don Juan and from the Duke of Sessa so that Your Majesty might show him favour he was captured in the galley Sol, he and his brother, who also served Your Majesty in the same campaigns, and they were taken to Algiers, where they spent such heritage as they ...”

“... out of the car to kiss Marie-Jo: at this hour the baby is always being pushed in her pram towards home by the nursemaid. One day Simenon was unable to stop on the narrow road because another car was approaching him, and, minutes later, the baby girl fell into a kind of coma. A doctor was called in at once, and he advised Simenon to pick the baby up and hold ...”

“... of reputation, with a talent which a recent reviewer has termed ‘prodigal’. He has returned to home ground for the Coronation street-party (now, it seems, hitched up with Margaret, the farmer’s daughter he played with as a child). But despite the feasting, this is not a prodigal’s return. ‘I mean to go on,’ he says. At the heart of this engrossing ...”

“... a sub-plot concerning a Mafia-type gangster, and the educated woman whom he marries and keeps at home among his relatives and dependants, before strangling her and burying the body in the back-garden. She hasn’t remained faithful to him: that’s what has brought on his homicidal outbreak. Her lover, Bertrand, is meanwhile obtaining absolution in a ...”

“... But the office itself ennobles.’ Mr Vidal works mostly in Italy, to avoid the fate of stay-at-home American writers, which is alcoholism, but he’s famous just the same, and also very rich, for the American public gives him money too. Amis warns us not ‘to indulge our vulgar delight in American vulgarity’. And to call much of what he reports simply ...”

“... as a boy. Thesiger’s uncle was Viceroy of India and the family included a general, an admiral, a Lord of Appeal, a High Court judge and a famous actor. As a small boy in Addis Ababa, which reeked excitingly of rancid butter and burning dung, he heard the throb of war drums and saw captive princes being led past in chains, a scene which implanted in him ‘a ...”

“... the first flying bomb landed on London. None of the characters in Unexploded is bombed out of a home, which makes a passage like this one seem oddly abstract: ‘Imagine it. You are lifted from your bed even before you hear the blast. The walls of your house are sucked in – a full ten inches – before they are pushed back out by a blast wind that ...”

“... of George III. In the course of his researches on certain ‘confidential letters’ written by Lord Bute in the early 1760s, Bottwink also manages to solve a murder. However, far from being the novel’s hero, the Namier figure is, in accordance with the reputation of his original, a crashing bore, dominating the breakfast table with the minutiae of his ...”

“... ruined with a bastard child.’ Places reappear. Amma and her friend Sylvester are entirely at home in the bar of the Ritzy cinema in Brixton in 2019, ‘surrounded by posters of the independent films they’d been going to see together since they first met’. Carole’s mother, Bummi, invited to a ‘Ghanaian fusion music night’ at the Ritzy a few ...”

“... on US territory. Diplomatic representations culminated in an exchange of letters between Lord Ashburton, special minister for the negotiations, and Daniel Webster, the US Secretary of State. They agreed that such raids could be justified only if there was a ‘necessity of self-defence, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment ...”

“... was supposedly the English East India Company’s patronage. The first Scottish Prime Minister, Lord Bute, allowed his countrymen the lion’s share of jobs and land in East and West Florida; while the conquest of Canada in 1759 enabled generations of Scottish settlers to impose their churches, culture, linguistic patterns, traditional sports and umpteen St ...”

“... away with weariness for a lover who may never come, is rebuked. She might have looked closer to home for relief. To abandon oneself to what is ‘elsewhere’, rather than to devote one’s attention to the birds of the house, is to invite fatal disappointment, visited on her by the unforgiving ‘amorini, who,/being unreal, demand/her head for what they ...”