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“... In​ 1993, frustrated and unfulfilled, Emmanuel Carrère was waiting on two replies – one from Satan, the other from God. He was 35, with four novels behind him but not enough fame for his liking. On 9 January, a newspaper story offered hope: in a small town in the east of France, a man called Jean-Claude Romand had murdered his wife and children, and then his parents and their dog ...”

“... voters in the Midlands and Labour’s northern heartlands (the fabled ‘Red Wall’).As Samuel Earle observes in his snappy (though under-edited) survey of the ‘Tory Nation’, the Conservatives, who were in power for most of the 20th century, are always able to draw on their identity as the party of government, committed to the ‘national ...”

“... It is good news that the man who solved the Tanagra figurine mystery has tracked down the Infant Samuel at Prayer. Wodehouse introduced this pious bibelot, which attracted such vandalistic passions, in 1912 and used it again in 1914; a notable revival came in 1938 when Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia, seething with high emotion and seeking an outlet, had her ...”

“... not invariably grave or even invariably temperate. That influential Puritan, the Cambridge don Samuel Ward, whose career has received respectful treatment from historians, is here portrayed as a ‘guzzling’, ‘moping pluralist’, the introspective musings of his diary paraphrased with an unaccustomed want of sympathy: ‘Was he of the Elect? Could he ...”