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“... Ziggy Stardust himself to dedicate a performance to Save the Whale. FoE also took out quarter-page adverts in the Times, signed by famous people. One veteran recalls: ‘We got a call from Peter Scott to say: “Why haven’t you asked HRH to sign it?” That was a day! We knew we had arrived in that field at least.’ It seems fair to say that someone ...”

“... which is developed alongside two innovative hypotheses. ‘Climate,’ he writes on his final page, ‘has helped shape civilisation, but not by being benign.’ In many ways this is a climatic version of ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’; but it also represents a novel approach, for until now archaeologists have been more inclined to point ...”

“... of the original, something Quigly frequently alters. This seems crucial on the novel’s first page where Morante sets up three short paragraphs, the first establishing the boast contained in the name, which is then dismissed with ‘unfortunately’, which opens the second paragraph. This second paragraph then speaks of Arturo’s feelings for the person ...”

“... Chateaubriand calculates, ‘twenty times societies have formed and dissolved around me.’ On page 30 of a work that would run to three volumes, the central theme is emphatically stated: ‘This impossibility of duration and continuity in human relations, the profound forgetfulness that follows us wherever we go, the invincible silence that fills our ...”

“... were using much the same language. With complete assurance, editorials, columns and op-ed page articles purported to locate characteristics that have supposedly been present for centuries in these little-known Balkan peoples. For many Western commentators talking about the Serbs was a way of defining their own cultural superiority. Offering their ...”

“... collective art of the Redgraves is true.’ There is less reverence and more gossip to be had from Tim Adler’s The House of Redgrave, which describes Vanessa wrapping a napkin around her head and singing ‘Edelweiss’ at Natasha’s wedding, accompanied by Rupert Everett. On the other hand, Adler has a curious obsession with Vanessa’s second-rate film ...”

“... At some point in his mid-forties, the novelist Tim Parks developed a terrible pain, near-constant and located in embarrassing places: his lower abdomen and crotch. ‘I had quite a repertoire of pains at this point: a general smouldering tension throughout the abdomen, a sharp jab in the perineum, an electric shock darting down the inside of the thighs, an ache in the small of the back, a shivery twinge in the penis itself ...”

“... clarity of argument, compression, and honesty of feeling. I couldn’t blather all over the page as I found I could and did when I attempted free verse. Pouring my spirit into a cup into which some poet I admired had poured his, I found I was seized with an energy that came from outside myself. My inspiration was heightened; and because I was ashamed to ...”

“... liberal, prudente e saggio to those of a giovinastro and a paggio (a callow adolescent and a mere page). The page Cherubino, despite his giddy youth and relatively menial role, is of course a lad of good family. The post in the Count’s regiment to which he is so unavailingly despatched carries the rank of an officer; and ...”

“... absolute difference (or ‘otherness’). From this vantage point, Greek culture exists not on the page, but in the alien world of rituals, sacrifices, scapegoats and goat-songs that lies behind it. But for how much longer will this compartmentalisation of ‘modernising’ and ‘primitivising’ approaches be sustainable? There are strong indications of an ...”

“... flies elsewhere, this book is thus interrupted.’ No doubt this is why the marvellous 500-page Charterhouse of Parma (1839) had to be written in just 52 days, during which time the author shut himself up, as if in a prison, accepting no visits, working non-stop. At the centre of that novel is a prison and a hero in love, so in love that he is happy to ...”

“... and never take out the trash. I look out my window at a funeral home.’ By the end of the second page – as is the case in so many American short stories – the long shadow of Raymond Carver has fallen unmistakably over the narrative. The narrator describes his unusual line of work and various grotesque experiences from his past in an apparently ...”

“... treated so gently.’ It would take only two hundred years for this earth to be pounded into dust. Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths are among Australia’s most creative historians. Griffiths’s Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (1996) has become the most quoted work of Australian history in new research, and Bonyhady’s The ...”

“... into any convention there may be for fiction about the Holocaust and the camps. On the very first page we meet in Gyuri an observant, detached, self-obsessed boy who notices all details with crystal precision, and yet has no interest in the motives of other people, or in the background to what is taking place, unless they impact on his own hour-to-hour ...”

“... of an irreversible transformation in his party that has set it firmly back on the road to power. Tim Bale’s exhaustive and authoritative account is hedged throughout with academic caution, but it concludes in terms that treat the Conservatives’ return to office as a foregone conclusion: ‘just as was the case for Margaret Thatcher, Cameron will ...”