“... leap forward, be reversed and repeat. In ‘Christmas Every Day’, a children’s story by William Dean Howells from 1892, a father tells his daughter ‘a moral tale’ about a girl whose wish for endless Christmas Days was granted. In 1915, Einstein declared the girl’s wish theoretically possible. Time could loop. What would that be like? Until the ...”

“... good on food, as in The Golden Age, with its descriptions of the disgusting fare served at FDR’s White House) of the eras in which each of the novels is set. To debunk the ‘breathtaking lies’ of received opinion, academic as well as popular. To trace a great theme: America’s rise (or fall) from ‘flawed republic’ to ‘murderous ...”

“... a public unveiling of their amazing new healthcare robot, the Asimo. Asimo is short (4’3”) and white with a black facemask and a metal backpack. It resembles an unusually small astronaut. In the video Asimo advances towards a staircase and starts climbing while turning his face towards the audience as if to say, à la Bender from Futurama, ‘check out my ...”

“... war the only bit that is much remembered is the tragic finale: the handing over of Cossacks and White Russians and Croats at Klagenfurt in May 1945. The appalling consequences of this decision – thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered by Stalin and Tito – remain a black and unforgettable chapter. The accusations against Macmillan ...”

“... en route home I generally stop and have some tea at Bettys in Ilkley where I also buy an organic white loaf. Today the assistant tells me that the café (and presumably the four or five other branches in the Bettys chain) no longer does organic produce as they’ve changed their flour miller. ‘However,’ she assures me, ‘the flour is locally ...”

“... and destruction. Lindqvist draws on an extraordinary array of apocalyptic novels, starting with William D. Hay’s Three Hundred Years Hence, published in 1881. ‘I know what is going to happen to you, since for me it has already happened,’ Professor Meister, its visionary hero, insists. The future on which he reports is to be one of massive population ...”

“... Room and the Patient, a 1906 book which includes a reference to ‘anaesthetic tables’), William James, James Thomson, William Acton, Charles-Louis Philippe, W.R. Burnett (a crime novelist in whose High Sierra – published in 1940 – the phrase ‘She was … a one-night-stand type’ occurs), Edward Winslow ...”

“... own. What he resisted was the idea he was a Jew. He never said as much, but how else explain the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant name of his most famous fictional character, Holden Caulfield, whose height (6' 2½") and patch of grey hair, his Park Avenue family home, his chequered record in a succession of smart private schools, his wardrobe from Brooks ...”

“... delicacy to be found in a Constable cloud study as they could possibly be. And he is right: the white clouds in Palmer’s luminously bright cloud pictures (there is one in the Ashmolean, another in Manchester City Art Gallery) are anything but airy and breezy. The Magic Apple Tree struck Herbert as beautiful and peculiar in equal measure: ‘bright crimson ...”

“... to the Zionist takeover of their territory. Now things are better. Few columnists, of whom Mr William Safire is one, are as crude in their partisanship as was most of the American press until recently. The serious newspapers, whose education has been furthered by the activities of Menachim Begin, do at least make their readers aware that there are two ...”

“... were cut off by the edges of the frame, executed in bad lighting, or obscured when the performer, [William] Hurt, usually turned away from the camera, and hearing characters would sometimes talk without signing.’ Norden doesn’t spell out what is implied here: that for signing to be properly intelligible it must take precedence over lighting, composition ...”

“... grand and wealthy Margot Beste-Chetwynde. As it happens, her riches derive principally from the white slave trade, in which Pennyfeather becomes unwittingly implicated, and for which he uncomplainingly takes the rap. After some strings are pulled, however, he is released from prison and goes back to Oxford to pursue his theology degree. So anonymous a ...”

“... snaps, is a necrophile’s delight: photograph after photograph, in tiny, eye-straining black and white, of crosses, graves, plaques, inscriptions, bombed-out block-houses converted into monuments, decaying trench relics, dank rows of cypresses, grassed-over mine and shell craters, obscene-looking barrows, and yet more crosses and graves. Some of the photos ...”

“... its demolition in 1941 was a disgrace.Augusta Persse was born in 1852, and in 1880 she married Sir William Gregory, who was 35 years older than her. He died in 1892, and she outlived him by forty years. Lady Gregory made herself useful to Yeats, as Roy Foster shows in his biography of the poet, because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area ...”

“... to find when it was in front of me that I didn’t want it at all. I liked really thin, cheap, white sliced bread. I found that I had an interest in making a sandwich with plenty of butter and two grilled rashers. I can’t think why I could eat this when I could eat nothing else. I could also eat a sandwich of tinned salmon. A few times I made a big ...”