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“... to appear of the mammoth Life of Mahomet from Original Sources by the Scottish Orientalist Sir William Muir, a colonial administrator in India’s Northwest Provinces. Muir drew on the eighth-century hagiographer Ibn Ishaq, the Persian scholar al-Tabari, and the ninth-century biographers Ibn al-Waqidi and Ibn Sa‘d, pre-eminent authors of the sira, the ...”

“... spoken by the (real-life) biographer George Ticknor about his (real-life) subject, the historian William Prescott. But recent projects have been more collaborative: in 2009, Heti appeared as ‘Leonore’ in Leanne Shapton’s love story disguised as an auction catalogue, Important Artefacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Leonore Doolan and ...”

“... Out of context, his epigraphs can seem like sly jokes and maybe some are. The quotation from William of Ockham that begins Biting the Air – ‘Every property is the property of something, but it is not the property of just anything’ – relates to language and logic; but the poem is partly about intellectual property, and it isn’t uninteresting ...”

“... Winston Churchill. One may disapprove of spin, but there are limits. Balfour’s teacher at Eton, William Johnson, described him as ‘fearless, resolved and negligently great’. The sting is in the ‘negligently’; Johnson, author of the ‘Eton Boating Song’, was also the author of the famous and equally sharp judgment on Balfour’s great Liberal ...”

“... as ‘a man in a crowd of eunuchs’. The liberal critic Théophile Thoré (then publishing as William Bürger) contributed to the buzz by reporting that the entire canvas had taken only four days. That wasn’t true; but, like another of his claims for the picture, it stuck. ‘Henceforth,’ he declared, ‘Camille is immortal and will be called The ...”

“... in prison, he blames the paper for not taking enough interest in the Holocaust, he blames white America, he blames black America, he blames fast food, he blames 9/11, but most of all, and with enormous flagellating brio, he blames himself, which is a little harsh given those other things are so very much bigger than him. Blair’s book is better when ...”

“... such nonsense, nor, when confronted by Widdicombe’s at least equally simplistic demands, will William Hague. The fact that Labour has now loosed itself from its traditional moorings and restraints is visible, too, in the growing sleaze chronicled by Tom Bower. Although Bower has concentrated his efforts on Robert Maxwell and (the intimately ...”

“... Silchester village hall, and reading out, from a primitive autocue – a series of large sheets of white cardboard, the text handwritten on them in thick felt-tip pen – the story of the first Christmas, as my contemporaries performed what I spoke. The most thrilling scene for me had nothing to do with donkeys, inns, stables, babies, shepherds, angels or wise ...”

“... effect. It brought the Eisenstein family romance nicely to the boil. His father joined the White Army, he the Red. One thing not in short supply in the Red Army was theatre troupes (more than two thousand of them by 1920). Eisenstein had a great time in the Corps of Engineers building pontoon bridges – he never forgot the perpetuum mobile of the ...”

“... touch. The British diplomatic records – pink telegrams from the Foreign Office to its outposts, white ones sent to London from missions abroad – are full of entertaining examples. John Russell’s 1967 dispatch from Brazil begins: ‘Like the surface of the moon Rio is short of water, covered in dust and pocked with deep holes.’ American diplomats wrote ...”

“... yellow, teal and peach abound in the area. But with its high-ceilinged tenement flats, it attracts white bohemian types too. Morag Ramsay, a French and Spanish teacher, ushered me into her kitchen. There was a poster from a Cuban movie about Che Guevara on her kitchen wall. ‘I bought it on a street in Havana,’ she said. Ramsay, who is 59, had voted SNP all ...”

“... state, some of them unspeakable crooks and their wives not much better … One has given one’s white-gloved hand to hands that were steeped in blood and conversed politely with men who have personally slaughtered children. One has waded through excrement and gore; to be queen, I have often thought, the one essential item of equipment a pair of thigh-length ...”

“... and 1974, however, he showed no drawings at all, having come to think, as he told his biographer William Feaver, that his compulsion for linear accuracy was a ‘limiting and limited vehicle’. ‘He seems to have distrusted his own facility as a draughtsman,’ Treves writes, ‘and feared the future it promised of book illustration and decoration, but ...”

“... not met by her life with an obsessively productive and socially awkward scholar, but after reading William McNeill’s biography of Arnold Toynbee one begins to develop a little sympathy for this imperious, passionate, frustrated woman. Having divorced Toynbee, she initially took up with a man fifteen years younger than herself in what was assumed, at least by ...”