“... David Ellis and Mark Kinkead-Weekes ones) looming up awesomely over the first crest: but Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce was a very long book indeed, and it gripped one from start to finish. I think the answer may be, partly, that a biography simply has to have a narrative, and a non-prescriptive approach tends to ...”

“... apparently ubiquitous when one creature attempts to convey information to another. The dawn chorus may enchant or irritate at 4 a.m. but, if it irritates you, spare a thought for the singers, who are exhausting themselves in the effort. As is the kudu, when it wields its enormous horns, or the lyrebird dragging its fantastic tail, or the Great Bustard, in its ...”

“... the gasfield but Isis still controls most of Syria’s oil and gas production. The Caliphate may be poor and isolated but its oil wells and control of crucial roads provide a steady income in addition to the plunder of war. The birth of the new state is the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot Agreement ...”

“... displacement of people in Arab-dominated areas taken from IS, especially around Kirkuk. The KDP may succeed in pushing IS out of these areas and may even help retake Mosul, but if Washington fails to rein in the KDP’s territorial ambitions it is likely to find that the phenomenon of Sunni Arab radicalisation that ...”

“... claim in the title. Small question marks apart, the Companion will redraw the literary map. Richard Altick’s latest book takes as its thesis the unfashionable view that novels reflect life. Professor Altick retired some time ago, and obviously relishes the freedom of not having to follow critical fashion. ‘After many years of criticism that has ...”

“... circumvented the King-quota limit by bringing out five surplus horror tales under the pseudonym ‘Richard Bachman’. Unfortunately the Bachman books’ disguise was eventually penetrated. But, more significantly, their appeal was drastically altered when their true authorship was publicised. As King observed, Thinner sold 28,000 by ...”

“... career as the avatar of the good and the not-so-good, still travelling in the wake of Little Richard. The history of rock ’n’ roll focuses on the white triumvirate – Presley, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, who have at different times heaped contumely on themselves – neglecting its roots in Jazz and the Blues, and a sibling relationship with ...”

“... of Firbankian tristesse’), but the entire Constant section relies far too heavily on Richard Shead’s excellent critical biography, currently unavailable, issued in 1973 by Simon Publications, London. Motion admits his debt in the Acknowledgements, but virtually nothing we are told hasn’t stemmed from Shead; the narrative sequence is ...”

“... European and non-European histories being studied and written about in parallel, so that we may better understand how different parts of the globe have interacted with each other over time. But here of course is the subject’s greatest challenge. Few if any of us possess the necessary breadth of knowledge and skills which such a wide-angled view of the ...”

“... in their power … to confer upon you a certain favour, which if it does not cost you your life, may stick by you all your days.’The pox was also considered a badge of honour because it was associated with soldiers and sailors (men who were away from their wives for long periods and thought more likely to visit whorehouses and risk the ...”

“... be seen.’Some special forces memoirs have been so popular they have led to pulp franchises. Richard Marcinko, the first commander of SEAL Team Six, later convicted of defrauding the US government, published his bestselling memoir, Rogue Warrior, in 1992 and followed it with more than a dozen thrillers fictionalising various SEAL missions. Eric ...”

“... doing well’. Birt agreed, with consequences for the BBC as a whole. But it is also clear from Richard Lindley’s long, densely researched history of Panorama that the programme’s perceived importance over the past fifty years has been generated as much by its own staff, with their professional egos and particular working practices, as by outside ...”

“... For Eliot, as for many Anglo-Catholics, Andrewes was an iconic ancestor figure. Along with Richard Hooker, George Herbert and William Laud, this ‘right reverend Father in God’ seemed to embody Catholic continuity and spiritual moderation. The English Church, these men believed, had maintained amid all the upheavals of the Protestant reformation a ...”

“... similar to Mahler’s’, La Grange writes – and that Felix Weingartner would undergo after him. Richard Strauss, Böhm, Karajan and Maazel were later victims. The Viennese love nothing better than to greet a new director as a saviour and then to peck him to pieces. (Seiji Ozawa is next in line for the booby-trapped throne.) Mahler’s Jewishness was used ...”

“... years her local department store in Bayswater) – is one of several interesting points on which Richard Greene has nothing to say in this disappointingly flat biography. Why she did it she explained herself. It was, like so much in her life and work, the result of a famously (if productively) unhappy childhood. The Sitwells, Edith and her two younger ...”