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“... Put law in the context of a novel, and it reveals something about its nature, since it has no choice but to submit to the movement and equivocations of words. Schlink’s writing is oddly circular and self-referring, as if there is a problem that he can’t get away from, or that won’t go away. Homecoming can be read as an extended footnote to The ...”

“... exhibited to an eager public in thirty venues over the course of the following year. There was no apparent guilt about this deception, no winking admission, at least in public: Fenton simply wanted to play a part in the story. ‘Photographic Van’ (1855) ‘Eighth Hussars Cooking Hut’ (1855) ‘General ...”

“... insurance policies on him too. Seven months later, Dorcas herself was found dead in a car. She had no serious injuries apart from a fractured hyoid bone, which can sometimes indicate strangulation but can also be broken during autopsies; the medical examiner recorded ‘acute respiratory distress’ as the cause of death. Insurance policies? Check: 17 of ...”

“... It’s been two years since the last one, so it must be time for a new book of poems by John Ashbery. Like the old James Bond films, Ashbery’s late instalments arrive punctually, and you buy your ticket knowing what to expect: a suave cartoon with ridiculous gadgets, clever one-liners and last-minute escapes. ‘So Long, Santa’, the penultimate poem in Ashbery’s previous collection, A Worldly Country (2007), worried that ‘it will come round again/and we won’t be ready ...”

“... still accumulates, and how often this month’s masterpieces turn into the schlock of yesteryear. No: the fact is that movie critics have changed. There was once a time when Roger Manvell’s 1944 Pelican Book, Film, was a central work in most British film-buffs’ libraries. There were the Russian early fathers, of course, all tractors and montage; there was ...”

“... during this period. This means we can trace the genesis of the poem with far greater precision.No less important, the editors include almost every letter documenting the protracted negotiations that led to the publication of The Waste Land in the Dial (circulation: 9600), then the foremost literary journal in America. As part of the final publication ...”

“... was the only surviving portion. In 2002, Worden identified the deist and republican John Toland as the person most likely to have transformed ‘Ludlow, the builder of a godly commonwealth’ of the 1650s into ‘Ludlow, the radical Whig or “real Whig”’ of the 1690s.This enduring deception would appeal to Robert Harris, whose Selling ...”

“... were all 4 seene in bed together at one tyme.’ The documentation is scanty, and we have no Jacobean tabloids to furnish us with further juicy details – ‘Immigrants in Group Sex Romp!’ – but one fact which makes the case worth pursuing is the involvement of Shakespeare’s former landlord Christopher Mountjoy. There is an obvious link: like ...”

“... near-homophonous Alistair MacNeill; two of his screenplays had already been turned into novels by John Denis; and a third screenplay is undergoing similar treatment by Simon Gandolfi. In this curious world there are occasional legal hiccups. One such, not so much a hiccup as a cardiac arrest, recently befell HarperCollins when they were prosecuted and heavily ...”

“... reverential as its title. After maintaining that Cromwell’s ‘Grandeur he deriv’d from Heav’n alone’, that all his ‘parts [were] so equal perfect’, and that ‘Peace was the Prize of all his toils and care,’ Dryden predicted that ‘His Ashes in a peaceful Urne [would] rest.’ It was not to be. Less than two years later, Dryden was addressing ...”

“... of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the enclosure of Marske Moor in Swaledale to create a new farm, Cordilleras. The farm and most of the fields round about were named after places in South America, Valparaiso, Cotopaxi, Sierra Pedragosa and so ...”

“... Time moves​ in a mysterious way. Wolf Hall, the first instalment of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, appeared more than a decade ago. Its 650 pages covered the years from roughly 1500 to 1535. Three years later came Bring Up the Bodies, which in 410 pages created a tight tragic narrative about Cromwell’s part in the fall of Anne Boleyn over the single year 1535-36 ...”

“... majority of the population still live in houses’. Flats were not popular, nor were town centres. No Englishman would live over a shop if he could help it. It was to the country and the suburbs that the English retreated, to houses which, Muthesius noted with approval, were ‘to live in, not to look at’, practical and unpretentious. If the nation lacked a ...”

“... wrote a contrite and affectionate note to his first wife, Jane, assuring her that there would be no more ‘silly fits’. This curious phrase must, as Stourton supposes, allude to his infidelities. The risk would have been great, even had Clark been travelling by plane. Soon after posting the letter he began an affair with Barbara Desborough. Later, he was ...”

“... are frightened by these urban mad; respectable citizens good-naturedly ignore them as being of no more account than pigeons and as inscrutable as gang graffiti. In New York and Los Angeles (where they parody the consumer-mad host society by heaping their possessions in supermarket trollies), they are called the ‘homeless’. There is, as far as I ...”