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“... in history, but it was fleeting. Napoleon, who seized power in 1799, reneged on France’s promise of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ for those with dark skin. His regime couldn’t tolerate a former slave ruling over its most valuable colony. But Toussaint Louverture’s army of self-freed soldiers – men ...”

“... known to be a trashy writer of escapist romance: you’re likely to find Jamaica Inn, Frenchman’s Creek and Rebecca in the teenage section, and the other titles practically nowhere – so why this ardent study? By the end of it, though, Nina Auerbach has achieved quite a rehabilitation. This du Maurier is not one of a ...”

“... One of Shakespeare’s defining knacks, so it’s said, is his ability to render his own time and place more or less irrelevant to the appreciation of his art. So although it seemed uncontroversial when Paul Salzman recently related a rich and miscellaneous clutch of Jacobean publications (Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Donne’s elegies, Wroth’s Urania and Middleton’s Women Beware Women among them) to the political and cultural circumstances of 1621,1 since nowadays these texts are read only as period pieces anyway, it might appear shockingly polemical for James Shapiro to locate everything William Shakespeare wrote in 1599 in a topical context ...”

“... personal sessions with Welles. Brady never met Welles. They communicated by phone and letter, and so important and detailed – important if only because detailed – a study would have benefited from an appendix of notes and sources as in Leaming, who attributes every quote. As it is, we must take Brady on trust, an act of faith made more uncomfortable by ...”

“... what is still probably the best-known of all works of Marxist literary theory, Lukács’s The Historical Novel, written in Russian exile in the 1930s. Any reflection on the strange career of this form has to begin there, however far it may then wander from him. Built around the work of Walter ...”

“... The first thing that must strike anyone opening this well-produced book – and they may do so with apprehension, since company histories are notoriously bland – is the wonderful harvest of illustrations, ranging from No 1, a photograph of the founder and his son, the strangely whiskered Julius Reuter and Herbert, circa 1870, to No 63, a Reuters news picture of the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ...”

“... the Russian ambassador in Rome after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Graceful and witty, Gagarin’s drawings portray his social world much as Pope in ‘The Rape of the Lock’ portrayed his, in a spirit of satire touched with complicity. Gagarin’s Rome, like Pope’s London, emerges ...”

“... in August 1914. The angel had been caught on camera much later, in the Cotswolds in 1952. It’s a well-known story that British soldiers at Mons claimed they really did see angels – but that story, too, turns out to be unfounded. In September 1914 the Welsh writer Arthur Machen published a story called ‘The Bowmen’ in the London Evening News. In ...”

“... Dead Marilyn, Dead Orson is very much with us. He lives on, not only in the restored ‘director’s cuts’ of his re-released movies, the posthumously completed projects and newly adapted screenplays of never-made films, but as a character in other people’s novels, plays and movies. He haunts the murderous teenagers of ...”

“... its own shape. ‘We have argued, laughed, fought, forgiven, and feasted together at one another’s tables,’ the editors record. A particularly sharp fight must have been fought on the nature of the entries. The editors settled on a conservative dictionary of biography format with a leavening of category entries on such topics as ‘Pseudonyms’, ‘Black ...”

“... now under way under the great conseiller Braibant is the task of a decade where Bonaparte’s commissioners took little more than four months. In Hong Kong yet worse has happened: an attempt in the best colonial tradition of demented heroism to codify the English common law in Chinese (something nobody has yet done in English) in time for the handover ...”

“... out that he didn’t like them, that they were bad in other words, but nor could he not say that, so what came out of his mouth was impossible to grasp because I didn’t understand the basis. Can​ I read this before reading the other five books in the series? A. Yes, because this one begins with the publication of the series and people’...”

“... occasion – an election lost or won, a leader toppled or triumphant. How strange that the queen’s first minister had nowhere to speak to the nation from except a draughty stretch of pavement, competing with the noise of the birds and the rain and the traffic in Whitehall.Not anymore. Carved out of the old Privy Council Court Room in 9 Downing Street, where ...”

“... their directives and doctrines. Buchan wrote good English. Buchan taught you things.’ Usborne’s droll catalogue of his subjects’ reactionary excesses helped writers like Dornford Yates and the repellent ‘Sapper’ along the way to oblivion. Buchan continued to be read, but his reputation was battered: by 1960 or ...”

“... Bough as their Christmas pantomime. The confused ending weighs on the film but doesn’t wreck it, so we don’t need to hush up the confusion or pretend it isn’t confusion at all. Apocalypse Now is a great film, but a great film that gets lost, and the reasons for its getting lost are part of the film. Introducing the film at Cannes in May 1979, Coppola ...”