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“... To anyone attacked by a wild boar the advice from ancient and modern authorities is unanimous: do not run. Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scout Movement, estimated that a horse and rider would need three-quarters of a mile to catch a boar with a 50-yard head start. In 1914, Malcolm Crawford, ‘the Bengal hog hunter’, remarked on the boar’s skill in ‘jinking’, or making sudden changes of direction, even ramming his snout into the ground at full speed and using it as a fulcrum on which to spin ...”

“... existence offers some insight into wealth and its corruptions. Lemprière’s Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk is an astonishingly assured first novel, stretching across two centuries and much of the known world, with a title reminiscent of Foucault’s Pendulum. Both books construct a web of skulduggery and institutional conspiracy, the one ...”

“... real (within the context of the poem) situation to be considered as a mythic account at all. Lawrence Norfolk’s extraordinary new novel is, among many other things, concerned with the complicated relationship between history, myth and literature. It draws on the story of Meleager and the Kalydonian boar, a standard version of which, such as might ...”

“... watch between the Faeroes and Iceland, and made sure that Admiral Wake-Walker, with the cruisers Norfolk and Suffolk, was guarding the Denmark Straits. Tovey himself left Scapa at eight o’clock on Friday evening in King George V, accompanied by Victorious.Force H – consisting of Admiral Somerville in Renown, the carrier Ark Royal and the cruiser ...”

“... no need for the revitalising effects of his radicalism. A fortnight later, walking the midwinter Norfolk fens, Cook finally resolved that he must resign ‘if Tony embarks on a military conflict without a fresh UN resolution’. Cook would almost certainly have resigned whatever the fate of Lords reform, but Blair’s decisive rejection of an elected second ...”

“... view both of life and of art. Where is the actual eroticism in the work of Emily Brontë and D.H. Lawrence? Where is the heaven of Milton, Wordsworth and Blake? Where is Dickens’s hell? Where is the social realism in Crabbe’s ‘Tales’ or Mrs Gaskell’s or Arnold Bennett’s novels? In men and women and angels and demons? No, in places. We move about ...”

“... Fictional representations of real events from Hillsborough to the Stephen Lawrence case – mostly in the form of plays and television dramas – have played a surprisingly large part in shaping national debates about the police and police culture. Novels, however, tend either to use the figure of the detective to investigate larger questions than those of routine police work, or to fall back on the conventional oppositions (efficiency and incompetence, probity and graft) which tend to prop up the morphology of the fictional plod ...”

“... making a proper spectacle of himself. His peers had difficulty in fathoming this phenomenon. T.E. Lawrence thought Coward had ‘a hasty kind of genius’. Sean O’Casey spat spiders at the mention of his name: ‘Coward hasn’t yet even shaken a baby-rattle of life in the face of one watching audience.’ J.B. Priestley, as late as 1964, taxed him ...”

“... Tinniswood catches this kaleidoscopic world in snapshots: Nancy Astor jumping on the back of T.E. Lawrence’s motorbike and roaring down the drive at Cliveden, Stanley Baldwin sitting on a sofa at Fort Belvedere with Edward VIII, who had just decided to abdicate, both of them drinking whisky and crying. Indeed Lawrence and ...”

“... death, in 1925. His view of the war is that of an elderly patriot and rentier, a church-goer and Norfolk JP whose main work seems to have been fining violators of the wartime blackout regulations. Long before the Derby Scheme, he was an enthusiast for conscription, outraged to behold able-bodied young men lounging about London. He found the savagery of the ...”

“... taking in Fidel Castro, Elizabeth David, Erskine Childers, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Robert Byron, Lawrence Durrell, Le Corbusier, Malcolm MacDonald, Tambimuttu ... and Donald Maclean. It is completely typical of the whole book that Maclean (whom he knew at school at Gresham’s) is characterised solely by the phrase: ‘created a sensation ... by defecting to ...”

“... and a female chum welcoming ashore a boat-party of Ancient Egyptians at Sheringham in North Norfolk: the gods will be ‘happy in their swimming-trunks’ and the girls will lift up their skirts ‘and get drunk’. This sounds a bit like D.H. Lawrence proposing that life would be better if men went round wearing red ...”

“... she’d retrieved a full boxful of balls. The collector of women – Tallulah Bankhead, Gertrude Lawrence and Bea Lillie all draped themselves round his drawing-room – was a prudish parent, who sent his children scuttling out of his film shows as soon as a kissing scene’ threatened. Mrs Aitken Kidd has a killing line – of the ‘very flat, ...”

“... drive home a point. There was Gordon Wasson on mushrooms, William Emboden on narcotic plants, D.H. Lawrence on meeting interesting women, and Marcel Proust babbling about French society in a most peculiar syntax. I’d never heard of any of these writers; the slow-rising central horror of education in Middle America is that Great Expectations and that hollow ...”

“... the gardens of Wallington in far Northumberland are Scottish in style. And Blickling in Norfolk is as culturally and visually distinct as if it were ‘the furthest extremity ... of the United Kingdom’. Moreover, Lees-Milne is well aware that the Trust’s activities have served to invent a national past, not just conserve it. Little Moreton Hall ...”