“... fairy tale, even a wry modern one like Thurber’s ‘The Unicorn in the Garden’, is apt to be soft and sticky. The best are startling and mysterious but also commonplace. Before she died Angela Carter made a few notes for what was to be the introduction to her second collection of traditional tales. ‘The ...”

“... A building inhabited by George Nathaniel Curzon became a building with a history – one written by himself. Envisaging his own presence there as the latest episode in a colourful pageant of stirring deeds and raw emotions, he wanted that pageant to be properly chronicled ...”

“... Holmes while he was convalescing from Indian enteric fever, which had caused his ‘life to be despaired of’. In our century, only anxiety about Aids and social disintegration in Africa has brought a comparable merging of physical and political terror with fear of the Other. The history of science and the history of medicine have been late developers ...”

“... The most valuable prize ever awarded for a work of fiction was the $150,000 put up by Metro Goldwyn Mayer in 1948 for Ross Lockridge’s epic of the American Civil War, Raintree County. The prizegiver’s motive in setting up this award was venal. They wanted to spawn a blockbuster series of ‘books of the film’ in the manner of Gone with the Wind ...”

“... 1840s, another Scot, James Fergusson, was busily chronicling the history of world architecture. By the end of the decade, it was possible for architects in the most remote provinces to form a clear picture of Hindu cave temples or ancient Egyptian palaces, and to contrast them with more familiar Greek, Roman or Gothic buildings, all without getting up from ...”

“... The cheques, all made out to himself, totalled $250,000, and appeared to have been signed by Rice on the day before he died. When James A. Baker, a Texas lawyer whose firm had represented Rice for many years and who had drawn up his will in 1896, arrived in New York, he went to Rice’s Madison Avenue apartment, where he met Patrick. ‘I suppose you ...”

“... per annum. From the 1870s onwards, government stock was regarded with little more than contempt by active investors; it was for widows and orphans. It had not always been like that. Throughout the 1820s, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, over half of all government expenditure went on servicing the huge national debt, on paying high rates of interest ...”

“... was the least pretentious of writers. He wanted to write exciting narratives, books which could be ‘devoured face downwards on one’s bed’. (Life: A User’s Manual is a rather bulky volume for this purpose, though it qualifies in other respects.) Nevertheless he was a dedicated avant-gardist whose best works were inspired ...”

“... books reflect one or other of these concerns. Everyone outside the farming industry is outraged by its subsidised destruction of woodlands, hedges, wetlands and wildlife, as well as by the pollution of water sources by nitrogenous fertilisers. Others are worried about the seas, their ...”

“... and passionately involved in whatever job she was doing at the time. How could her diaries not be fascinating? Some commentators have damned them with faint praise: useful source material for future historians, and so on. But they are more than that. For anyone interested in how the political system works in Britain, and how history unfolded during the ...”

“... pay the interest on the one before last. How, I wondered at the outset, can the commercial bankers be so foolish as to lend if there is a good chance they will not get their money back? The answer emerges that it is Sampson who believes they might not get their money back – not the bankers. Do the bankers then delude themselves? If so, why? The answer to the ...”

“... and apolitical as a chef who is preoccupied with his craft – though an exception might have to be made for the trusty employed by the Borgias. Frenchmen, perhaps, are too realistic, or live too closely to their chefs, to subscribe to this view: it was a Frenchman who reminded the world that an army marches upon its ...”

“... established politics is obviously difficult, and is still unresolved. But it ought at least to be an intellectual responsibility to look at what this movement is really saying. Rudolf Bahro, who wrote The Alternative and was imprisoned and then released in East Germany, is one of its most articulate spokesmen. He is a Marxist who has taken a position in ...”

“... Shortly after the Sunday Times’s enforced move into the London Docklands, David Blundy and Jon Swain were strolling towards the new production plant’s heavily-guarded entrance. These two foreign correspondents are used to witnessing military activity (you may remember Swain as a character in Roland Joffe’s movie, The Killing Fields), but they were astonished to see an armoured car with a full complement of Royal Marines apparently patrolling inside the heavily-fortified perimeter fence ...”

“... though 20th-century Conservatives have included a few Whiggish eccentrics. The Liberal Party of David Steel bears little resemblance to it, except in some residual link with religious dissent and the geographical periphery. The old-style Labour Party inherited some Whig nostrums, especially in foreign policy and constitutional matters. The Tory Party, on ...”