“... to other people, he made no provision for his wife and children. Every commercial venture he took up was a failure. Like the Joyces, the Mangans flitted from one miserable house to another. The misfortunes the poet suffered included illness of several kinds, debility, and in later years addiction to drink and, it may be, to opium. His employment was ...”

“... to discern the state of religious life in the parishes. Local worthies sent reports to the bishop, John Trefnant, who processed through the diocese with a cadre of officials to investigate, judge and correct any troublesome behaviour. The visitation book, ‘an unsightly and tattered manuscript’, was discovered in the archives of Hereford Cathedral in ...”

“... Facebook just doesn’t care. When you’re in a room with them you can tell. They’re’ – he took a moment to find the right word – ‘scuzzy’.That might sound harsh. There have, however, been ethical problems and ambiguities about Facebook since the moment of its creation, a fact we know because its creator was live-blogging at the time. The scene ...”

“... turn in the tide of battle prevented a worse catastrophe than Hiroshima. In March 1985, Vanunu took his camera into the Dimona plant and systematically photographed it. How he was able to do so remains an important question for Israeli state security, celebrated so often (with the help of its own propaganda machine) as ruthlessly efficient. At any rate, by ...”

“... By chance, the evening I took this book to bed for the painful reading expected, I jabbed the tooth of a comb down a fingernail and cried out. As a reminder of what Klaus Barbie was about, not just at the Hotel Terminus in Lyon forty years ago but at the Bolivian Joint Chiefs of Staff headquarters in La Paz as late as 1980, the moment served ...”

“... by side (the so-called ‘Two Emperors’ style) imply that co-operation resumed, but the Vikings took over the wealthy and well-populated eastern Midlands (the Danelaw), leaving Ceolwulf in control of only western Mercia. His reign ended after five years.That Ceolwulf was recognised as king is consistent with his issuing coins. London, where Mercian coins ...”

“... counting those in Washington). Alcatraz, which had been a military prison before the Feds took it over, wasn’t big; it couldn’t be, because there was no water on the island. Every drop of water used there – and the island housed the guards and their families as well as the prisoners – had to be brought in by boat. The per capita cost of ...”

“... of his novel, Plot, won the Best Screenplay Award at the 2007 Shanghai TV Festival; Mai Jia took the producer to court over which of their names should appear first in the credits. When The Message – a film based on one of the elements in Plot – was released in 2009, he got embroiled in a legal dispute about self-plagiarism. I can’t recall any of ...”

“... This was marked by a barely suppressed tension between himself and many Social Democrats as he took the Party towards the right. But the authority of his leadership and a sustained performance of great skill in Parliament and on television kept the SDP in the public eye. Of the 16 by-elections held between 1983 and 1987, the Alliance won five and was ...”

“... of Oklahoma, and of her adversary, Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas, and of his Senate sponsor, John Danforth, and of his most effective champion on the Senate Judicial Committee, the fearsomely-named and viciously forensic Arlen Spector. On 11 October, when Professor Hill began her televised allegations, this was the only part of the campus to show any ...”

“... the creator of Sherlock Holmes somehow possessed himself of one of her gloves, and at once took it to a Mr Horace Leaf with a result which he describes in a letter to the Morning Post, written on 16 December (ten days, that is, after Agatha Christie had vanished), and now reprinted in the present volume of selections from Conan Doyle’s letters to the ...”

“... was founded. It infected the clockwork socialism which was so popular in the Thirties. Men like John Strachey could see that capitalism wasn’t working, and so concluded, empirically, that it could never, even for a moment, rise above its contradictions or expand. When there was a period of steady capitalist expansion for thirty years after the ...”

“... by funding an online lottery to award 113 people 10,000 RMB (£1130) each – 23 million netizens took part. Educated in England (Winchester and UCL), Wang Sicong’s style is in every way different from his father’s, which is quite low-key. Wang Jr enjoys conspicuous consumption, showing off his private jet, his fancy cars, his dozens of girlfriends ...”

“... whole event in some sane perspective? They cannot retreat into a grand carelessness until they are John le Carré or John Fowles. They might begin, however, by running through the list of previous winners and working out how many of the last 19 would feature in any ‘true’ list of Top 19 Novels 1969-87. They might observe ...”

“... more recent Erics – Ambler, Sykes, Shipton, Heffer – oozed shame when signing their names. John Betjeman, in Summoned by Bells, agonises over Farrar’s ‘mawkish’ and ‘oh-so-melodious’ book through which runs a schoolboy sense of impending ‘Doom! Shivering Doom!’ The doom which Betjeman and his contemporaries at Marlborough dreaded was no ...”