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“... descriptive detail agitates the imagination as Dr Lasson’s rather flat story-telling does not. Nigel Williams, who won the Somerset Maugham Award for Fiction in 1978, has produced a second novel, which shows plenty of talent but is rather a mess. Its hero, Jack Warliss, a writer of sorts, invents a series of aliases for himself as he struggles to find his ...”

“... the North African coast; and the rare and exquisite bianco e nero antico from Aquitaine in the far west. Seneca, in his letters, bemoaned the fact that Rome’s demand and curiosity could never be satiated. The cargoes of marble, already cut into columns or blocks and slung under the surface of the sea between two barges lashed together in the form of a ...”

“... into my life as she has had in hers,’ Violet wrote in the summer of 1918 to Vita Sackville-West. She had begun to squeeze a very indiscreet romance with Vita into her own life. The girls’ passion for each other was to be the subject of an early novel by Sackville-West called Challenge and secretly dedicated to ...”

“... because more investors suddenly wanted to sell than to buy shares. Prices began to fall, and what Nigel Lawson has called the ‘herd’ instinct of the market ensured that the fall, once started, became self-reinforcing. However, this mechanistic explanation throws no light on why there should have been a sudden reversal of sentiment in the market. Because ...”

“... with sections he needed for Esmond marked boldly in ink. Nowadays the keeper would have him at West Central Police Station before the offending liquid was dry. Thirty years later, in New Grub Street (1891), there is a scene in which Gissing’s unfortunate Marian Yule sits in the BM Reading Room with a heart full of anything but grateful reverence. The ...”

“... Dangers of Deterrence, published in 1983 with the same editors. Both were designed, according to Nigel Blake and Kay Pole, to rescue a debate in which issues were being ‘extremely badly handled’ either because, though philosophical in nature, they were not being treated as such, or because, though they were recognised as philosophical, the treatment was ...”

“... impact of this doctrine on the morality of state conduct can be gauged by the new edition of Nigel Rodley’s classic work on the treatment of prisoners, both lawful and de facto. Rodley, an academic lawyer and a member of the UN Human Rights Committee, accepts that international law has been ‘decidedly ambitious in the limits it sets on the behaviour ...”

“... Henry Farr is – or, as it turns out, is not – the ‘Wimbledon Poisoner’ of Nigel Williams’s title. He is a Pooterish solicitor, middling and muddling his way through life; the plot concerns his repeated farcical failure to murder his awful wife, bumping off (he thinks) other innocent people instead. Then, as the plot unravels and a real poisoner shows his hand, Henry discovers that his wife is not so awful after all ...”

“... be regarded as anything but a disaster in terms of Nicolson’s public career. Vita Sackville-West was the daughter of Lord Sackville. Had she been a boy, she would have inherited Knole, one of the most famous country houses in England, together with the estates entailed in the male line upon her cousin Eddy. She bitterly resented this deprivation, the ...”

“... During 2005, while Nigel Cliff was writing his wonderful book about the Astor Place riot, I too visited a couple of the archives he consulted, namely the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the New York Historical Society. Long fascinated by the events of 10 May 1849, I couldn’t leave Manhattan without making a pilgrimage to Astor Place ...”

“... transformation that rapidly followed has, in broad terms, recently received a powerful boost from Nigel Hamilton’s lengthy coverage of these events, buttressed by the recollections of numerous participants. The Auk, however, has always had his own champions: notably, his two previous biographers, John Connell and Roger Parkinson, and Correlli ...”

“... you cannot have James Brooke with it,’ Sylvia replied. The elusive love interest is the nub of Nigel Barley’s lightweight but entertaining biography, and he devotes a great deal of energy to establishing whether Sylvia was right about Brooke’s incapacity. Brooke suffered his wound in his first week of service in the army of the East India Company while ...”

“... Again and again, Dyer convicts himself out of his own mouth. As his friend Major General Nigel Woodyatt later told him, ‘he was bound to get the worst of it; not so much for what he had done, but for what he had said.’ As Nigel Collett declares in The Butcher of Amritsar (2005), his magisterial Life of ...”

“... punctuated with bursts of laughter. Chernoff heard such laughter everywhere. Travelling through West Africa, ‘a student of society and a musician’, he was amazed by the spirit of the people he met; they seemed cheerful, gregarious, and above all adaptable, meeting misfortunes philosophically. What he saw contrasted with Western ideas about Africa, a ...”

“... in the early tenth century, whose direct rule was limited to the south of England and the west midlands, was recognised as king of Britain. More confusingly still, Molyneaux identifies an ironic precursor of the West Lothian Question: in the eighth century Bede described the church at Abercorn in ...”