“... Literature’, and log every instance, all the way from D.H. Lawrence and Anna Wickham through John Betjeman to Martin Amis, of one single placename’s use to connote a vast tundra of anodyne, apathetic anonymity. Here, though, Croydon is exactly where you’d expect Lodge to make his couple come from: a prompt for often disappointingly chummy humour at ...”

“... Auden had gone to Berlin to study soon after he left Oxford. There he met the anthropologist John Layard, who showed him the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute for Sexual Science. Auden also discovered the gay bars of Berlin. Through Layard he became acquainted with the revolutionary teachings of the American psychologist Homer Lane. Auden invited his friend ...”

“... as much of the medieval Alexander, the fictional hero of romantic tradition, as of the ancient King of Macedon. At the moment of his discovery, the impact of America was absorbed in layers of his own reading and made to fit his capacious image of himself. Like the artist who showed Cortés riding into Mexico on an elephant, he accommodated his vision of ...”

“... heavily on such Western travellers to Mecca as Ludovico de Varthema, Domingo Badia y Leblich, John Lewis Burckhardt and Richard Burton. While most Western reports pretended to be objective, in some cases this was a pretence only, and Peters would have been better advised to have treated Varthema’s 16th-century Itinerario as a novel about oriental ...”

“... on an unprecedented scale is vividly illustrated in The Great Purges, which contains some of David King’s collection of contemporary photographs, together with a commentary by Isaac Deutscher: ‘In presenting these scenes, I had to reconstruct a nightmare.’ We must hope that, for a majority or Russians, their dreams have become pleasanter: but we do well ...”

“... the same time, it is controversial, for, to revert for a moment to the Stuarts, Dr Morgan has his King Charles’s head. He has returned from his investigations with an enthusiasm for the Coalition which bubbles through all his critical reservations. The standard view of the Lloyd George Government is that it was founded on pure expediency, and its ...”

“... strife under Vichy and the Nazi occupation, have come from transatlantic scholars such as John C. Cairns, Philip Bankwitz, Telford Taylor and Robert O. Paxton. Eleanor M. Gates might modestly disclaim inclusion in such distinguished company. But she has produced a splendid book which is both instructive and moving. She is not much interested in the ...”

“... Then we found out what the modernists were rebelling against.’ Eugenides studied at Brown with John Hawkes and at Stanford with Gilbert Sorrentino, exacting experimentalists who were ‘against order on the whole and against storytelling’. By setting much of his new novel at Brown in the early 1980s, Eugenides returns to the time of the fall; by ...”

“... generally poor affairs, by continental standards. Thomas Farnaby, who edited Seneca’s plays, and John Bond, the editor of Horace, were both schoolmasters and aimed to produce editions which explained what poets meant in terms that could be understood by grammar school and university students. The generation of scholars around Bentley brought about huge ...”

“... 4 of A Human Document into a visual and verbal meditation on 9/11. Phillips glues in a postcard of King Kong clutching the World Trade Center, and a version of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children, and obscures all but 17 words from Mallock’s prose: ‘pasted on to the present/see, it is nine/eleven/the time singular/which broke down illusion.’ This ...”

“... of the information that War and Peace contains. Even novels in which almost nothing happens – John McGahern’s, for instance – will speak in historical whispers, aiming to ‘disimprison’, as Coleridge once said, ‘the soul of fact’. Beryl Bainbridge was one of the last of the pre-Google English novelists, the last, you might say, following ...”

“... as M/M. Some prolific pairings: Harry and Draco from Harry Potter, Edward and Jacob from Twilight, King Arthur and Merlin, Captain America and Iron Man, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson (given the portmanteau Johnlock).If the lure of reading fan fiction is clear, the lure of writing it is less obvious. On the surface, writing ...”

“... could break out in other friendly states. Asked whether he expected similar unrest in Jordan, John Kerry, who was admirably forthright in calling for Mubarak to stand down, dismissed the idea: ‘King Abdullah of Jordan is extraordinarily intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive, in touch with his people. The monarchy there ...”

“... of the American police in the late 1990s. It is striking how closely his story resonates with John Kani’s account of being arrested after a rehearsal of Othello in apartheid Johannesburg in 1987 and interrogated about his onstage relationship with Joanna Weinberg’s Desdemona.If there is an intellectual faultline in Little’s collection, it is between ...”

“... was designed to be sent with an ‘enclosed message of sympathy from their Gracious Majesties the King and Queen’. The message’s wording was chosen by Rudyard Kipling and the secretary of state for war, Lord Derby. Kipling wanted to use a form letter with blank spaces, allowing for what he termed ‘M. S. interpolation’, but the proposal was vetoed by ...”