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“... Which is why history needs to engage emotions as well as the mind. Luise Hercus, Flavia Hodges and Jane Simpson, the editors of The Land Is a Map, represent a new generation of young scholars skilled in indigenous languages. Their work is a sort of archaeological toponymy: placenames are like artefacts in surface archaeology. In their introduction, they ...”

“... Mona Simpson’s novels are long and loose, and make compulsive reading. She not only writes about obsession, but she passes on the effect with extraordinary directness, almost as though there’s no separate authorial presence in her books at all – art concealing art with a vengeance. A Regular Guy is her third novel, and in it she celebrates her first ten years in the business by surrendering her addiction to ‘I’, and edging just a little further over into fictionality with the invention of self-made hero Tom Owens, the multi-millionaire founder of a West Coast biotech company he christens ‘Genesis’: ‘He thought of himself as a guy in jeans, barefoot in the boardroom ...”

“... been widely commented on’. Television may have made it almost impossible to find a jury for O.J. Simpson, but before TV there was the cigar store. One potential juror owned a cigar store and said that he had discussed the case with his customers. He had heard many different opinions of it but admitted that the more he sided with the opinion of a ...”

“... preoccupations of fans are the most beautiful and worrying things about modern pop. Here’s ‘Jane’: There was a programme on TV about what would happen if there was a nuclear war. And I think if a nuclear war did happen I’d be thinking: Is Boy George safe? . . . I remember when ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ first came out. I saw him leaving a ...”

“... vacuous feature film will be clogging up the multiplexes. In reworkings of the Tudor soap opera, Jane Boleyn is more often known as Jane Rochford, wife of George Boleyn, sister-in-law to Anne the queen. There are some lives we read backwards, from bloody exit to obscure entrance, and ...”

“... chiefly because it was written about, and written about in high-cultural forms like the novels of Jane Austen or the slow-selling poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Favret reminds us that much of the literature of Romanticism was produced and consumed at a time when everyday life was suffused with the awareness of war. This has only recently become clear to ...”

“... the crew of his gunboat), others notoriously faked: the young John Kerry on a podium with ‘Hanoi Jane’ Fonda at an antiwar rally. A half-hour before midnight on 30 April, far from prime time, Ted Koppel read out the names of ‘the fallen’ and flashed up their photographs, two at a time, about three seconds each, for 30 minutes or so, interrupted by ...”

“... was Jessica Lange and as were Uma Thurman and Oprah Winfrey. His only autograph refusal came from Jane Fonda. I was impressed by how many people didn’t go for Gump. Usually, success is everything and brings everything in its train, but the idea that the industry regarded this as its best effort was widely thought to be embarrassing. As the movie’s ...”

“... works of what is now called literary fiction tend to be aggressively regional – think of Jane Smiley’s Iowa, Jane Hamilton’s Midwest or E. Annie Proulx’s Newfoundland. They are literary postcards, nostalgic, often mawkish renderings of some quaint locale. Fulsomely praised as ...”

“... record a social life as well as a professional one. From the wedding pictures of Edward and Mrs Simpson to stars in Hollywood hotel rooms, the impression you get is that he wasn’t so much a photographer – who after all is a functionary, a kind of servant – as a friend who happened to bring his Rolleiflex along. He seems to have been able to imagine ...”

“... of choice for intellectual and artistic women, the actress Arletty, Kenneth Clark’s wife Jane, and in fiction Muriel Spark’s girls of slender means, who shared one Schiaparelli dress between them. Her influence owed a great deal to the ease with which some, at least, of her work could be pirated, and she took imitation in the right spirit: ‘The ...”

“... of Katherine Howard to the junketings of the Prince Regent to the modern-day mischief of Mrs Simpson. But a new world began, I think, in 1980, with the discovery that Diana, the future Princess of Wales, had legs. You will remember how the young Diana taught for a few hours a week at a kindergarten called Young England, and when it was first known that ...”

“... would, if asked, tell us many little particulars about the subsequent career of her people,’ Jane Austen’s nephew wrote in his Memoir of his aunt. In this traditionary way we learned that Miss Steele never succeeded in catching the Doctor; that Kitty Bennet was satisfactorily married to a clergyman near Pemberley, while Mary obtained nothing higher ...”

“... Mauleverer, though, seems a proper boyhood embodiment for the Prince of Wales – and Mrs Simpson is brought in satisfactorily to extend the role at Greyfriars reserved for Marjorie Hazeldene, an especially ripping schoolgirl in everyone’s view. Where in all this, we might ask, is the Bounder of Greyfriars? Another strand in contemporary history ...”

“... jazz age. This was perhaps the only period in which women who looked like Schiaparelli and Wallis Simpson, with their hefty, dynamic profiles, could have been leaders of fashion. Women were prominent in the world of haute couture between the wars. As well as Schiap, as she was known, there were Coco Chanel and Jeanne Lanvin. Schiaparelli’s ...”