“... Designed to keep the hair from obscuring the vision, it was pulled so tight that, as the veteran John Shipp testified, a soldier could scarcely open his eyes. The Tsar’s soldiers had their queues stiffened by iron bars. But the most hated item of equipment was the neckstock, a kind of heavy leather cravat intended to force the soldier’s head erect ...”

“... explained? Above all, how were they managed? A fine start in this historical quest was made for North America a few years back with James Trent’s Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States. Historians in this country, too, have been snorkelling in the archives, and the first fruits of their hunt are now presented in ...”

“... cut down to size, from one guidebook to the next: ‘It is a noble pile of building, a little north of the church, upon the edge of the Park, on a rising ground, commanding a fine prospect of the sea, from an opening between the hills.’ The prospect is holding up well enough. Bindon Hill still rises up to the south and culminates against the sky; Arish ...”

“... a huge majority, Gollancz started up the Left Book Club. Here were three socialists – Gollancz, John Strachey and Harold Laski – meeting in a restaurant and establishing a publishing venture which would, over ten years, produce and sell six million books, most of them new, and all of them aspiring to a social order where the common interest would ...”

“... quietly suggested, ‘They grow into dogs, I expect, and marry bitches.’ White’s war in the North African desert was dreary on the whole, but it took him to Alexandria where, in July 1941, he met Manoly Lascaris, ‘this small Greek of immense moral strength, who became the central mandala of my life’s hitherto messy design’. Forty years later they ...”

“... peace and destroying the good order of the community.’ This was in 1771. Five years later Lord North, who, though not perhaps a figure of the most shining merit, had certainly been ‘soiled’ by much journalistic obloquy, increased the tax on paper by 50 and on advertisements by 100 per cent. Pitt put it up even more. In the first half of the 19th ...”

“... about to crack, planned a bold strategic advance, breaking from the Ypres salient and striking north to the Belgian coast, thus liberating the U-boat bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge. Lloyd George and the War Cabinet viewed this plan with a shudder, but the military assured them that their own plans, in so far as they had any, offered worse dangers. In the ...”

“... which are intended to show how dangerously lies can escalate. He is at a boarding-school in North Wales when a friend mentions a newspaper headline. ‘The headline was WHERE IS JACK RAYNER? It said that lots of money was missing as well. Is that your dad?’ Rayner thinks for a minute about how he might stick up for his father then says: ‘No ...”

“... timing, that fuelled my admiration. There can have been nothing more absurd to the audience of North London middle-class parents and schoolboys than my production.My mother was a Jewish New Yorker, and one was as likely to come across Mort Sahl, S.J. Perelman and James Thurber dotted around the family home as H.B. Morton or Wodehouse. Despite ...”

“... by scholars whose main source was the Bible. (The evangelical adventurer and self-publicist John MacGregor found this a problem on a canoe trip down the Jordan in 1868.) Aspirant surveyors quickly discovered that they needed the co-operation of local tribal leaders, some of whom collaborated in the hope that it would encourage a British force to invade ...”

“... role.’ Turning the page, readers discovered mat Monday’s Radio 1 schedule included ‘John Peel ... live in Manchester with Number One Cup in session and poetry from sex-bard Simon Armitage’. Armitage’s ability to play goalkeeper in both divisions, to two-time Radio 1 and Radio 3, to learn not only from Heaney but from Peel (about whom he has ...”

“... after which a framing story loops back towards the book’s first sentence. Along with the Being John Malkovich effect that Hemon gets by surrounding Pronek with other versions of himself, all this just about dovetails with his thematic concerns. A sense of ‘stale disreality’ with regard to personal identity afflicts all his displaced characters sooner ...”

“... genial voice of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). The narrator’s name is Silver, as in Long John. She lives with her mother in Salts, in the far north-west of Scotland near Cape Wrath: ‘cliff-perched, wind-cleft’, a ‘Fossil Town’, ‘salted and preserved by the sea that had destroyed it too’. When her mother ...”

“... direct visitors to the site of Rip Van Winkle’s cottage, and recently there was a move to rename North Tarrytown ‘Sleepy Hollow’ – an idea that seemed authentic to everyone except the people who lived there. In the same myth-making spirit, Maxwell Anderson’s play places a chorus of ghosts on High Tor. His ancient Indian (the last of his ...”

“... a Land Rover driven by a Chechen. Dressed in a vintage Puma tracksuit he resembles ‘the infamous North Korean playboy Kim Jong Il’; swaddled in a Hyatt Hotel robe he feels ‘like the Reichstag must have felt when it was being draped by Christo’. Squalid, horrifying and attractive, Misha is meant to embody the excesses and contradictions of our ...”