“... and ‘Robin’ were all used to characterise Walpole as an ambitious upstart, heading for a fall. More often, names were gutted or (as Henry Fielding put it) ‘emvowelled’, with dashes or asterisks replacing key letters or every character except the first. This technique had rich potential. It could cast a marketable aura of the clandestine over even quite ...”

“... he’s going to Cambridge. It’s an outrage. Never mind that Bristol would have known that it was more than likely Cambridge would make him an offer, and even more likely he’d take it up, so that whether thay made an offer or not was likely to be, for want of a better word, academic. Spoilt-bastard effrontery is immune to ...”

“... would have been a deal-breaker if he had. In any case, the British head of counter-espionage was more than happy to hire the services of Okhrana agents, and Reilly signed on with Melville in 1896.Soon afterwards he met Margaret Thomas, the much younger Irish wife of a rich Welsh clergyman. Reverend ...”

“... name on a communal bookplate; for £150 you get a book to yourself; and for donations of £1000 or more you can choose which book you get (comedian, football fan and former English teacher Frank Skinner has apparently made an early bid for Johnson’s Dictionary). You also get a certificate and the chance to attend an annual ‘meet your ...”

“... telephone system for deaf people and a device to save epileptics from drowning in the bath. The more work he has done with computers and artificial neural networks, however, the more convinced he has become that it won’t be long before there are autonomous machines that are ...”

“... as St Marina.Marinos, who may have lived in the fifth century in what is now Lebanon, is one of more than thirty transgender monks commemorated in Byzantine and Western texts. Many are revered as saints. Despite an explicit biblical prohibition on cross-dressing, reinforced by canon law, trans monks caught the imaginations of worshippers because they so ...”

“... first with a memoir and now, writing under her married name as Joyce Johnson, has added a second, more substantial account. Kerouac’s friend and champion Allen Ginsberg, who longed to be his lover as well, kept a journal famous for its bulk. Many of Kerouac’s friends wrote books and all seem to have written long letters no one threw away. Some of the ...”

“... Every Friday and Saturday night, more than a thousand twentysomethings attend a club night in London known as School Disco. The dress code is strictly school uniform, the music 1980s disco. Smoking in the toilets is encouraged. The man who started it, ‘in a small back-street restaurant . . . back in September 1999’, Bobby Sanchez, explains its origins on the website, www ...”

“... a psychologist at the University of Wales, Swansea. It turns out that readers of fiction are more likely than non-readers of fiction to have ‘bizarre dreams’ in which impossible or unlikely things occur. Last night I dreamed that I was an assistant rhinoceros trader in ancient Athens called Ali Shah. How this might be connected to John Updike’s ...”

“... be revealed in January, so long as the leadership of the Tory Party doesn’t get in the way. The more hilarious sayings of George W. Bush have been collected in The Bush Dyslexicon by Mark Crispin Miller (Bantam, £6.99): ‘the great thing about America is everyone should vote’; ‘more and ...”

“... the freight was unloaded piece by piece into dockside warehouses, from where it was loaded once more into lorries or onto trains for the next stage of its journey. The huge reductions in cost and time brought about by the rise of the container led to radical economic changes. ‘For workers,’ Levinson mildly writes, ‘this has all been a mixed ...”

“... obituarist wrote, ‘and he was fortunate in never having had to meet a situation demanding more of him than he had to offer’ – the Cicero Affair clearly not counting as a ‘situation’. Indeed, it was ‘proof of the high regard felt in the Foreign Office for Hugessen that this strange affair did not affect his career.’ The proof is in the ...”

“... of the household who were connected by ties of kindred with the head, as opposed to the slaves.’ More recently, ‘free’ has come to be used by the leaders of the ‘free world’ to signify simply the world that they lead. This shift can be seen as a reversal of the process described by the OED, a return to the earlier meaning: the ‘free’ now are ...”

“... I once had a teacher who was known for taking a more than professional interest in some of his pupils, especially the boys in the school cricket team. Too short-sighted to see an incoming cricket ball until it was inches from my face, by which time it was too late to do anything more useful than flinch out of the way, I was never one of those he liked to tickle as he strolled about the classroom – unlike my friend G ...”

“... of Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe. Clued-up children – in other words, those whose parents were more interested in athletics than mine – knew all about the rivalry between ‘the Tough and the Toff’, as Pat Butcher calls them in his new double-subtitled book, The Perfect Distance: Ovett and Coe: The Record-Breaking Rivalry (Weidenfeld, £14.99); and ...”