“... 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 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 ...”

“... the Prime Minister. At least we still live in a country where no one could have wondered for more than a moment at the ambiguity of the recent Evening Standard billboard that read: police murder suspect in ...”

“... though it should hardly have come as a surprise. The local Conservatives found it ‘sad’; one more sanguine resident told a national newspaper that everyone needed to have a hobby. The Labour prospective parliamentary candidate, Paul Harvey, called for a by-election; he was ignored. By the time of his defection to the DUP, the Tories should have got used ...”

“... his features were pixellated – reducing, as it happens, the resolution of his mugshot to more or less the same level as that of his secret pictures of the cadets. The hysterics continued inside the paper: a double-page spread describing The Investigator’s day out was underpinned by a few stern words from Andy McNab (‘Gulf War hero and ex-SAS ...”

“... gives the other point of view of the encounter between British and American prisoners: ‘To the more reserved, stiff-upper-lip types it seemed that the Yanks – “full of enthusiasm and exuberance”, as a rather more sympathetic RAF officer put it – complained too much about the level of deprivation they encountered ...”

“... Thomas and Katia Mann had six children. It was clear from early on that Katia most loved the second child, Klaus, who was born in 1906, and that Thomas loved Erika, the eldest, born in 1905, and also Elisabeth, born in 1918. The other three – the barely tolerated ones – were Golo, born in 1909, Monika, born in 1910, and Michael, born in 1919 ...”

“... father in a similar way. He refers so often to the dying man’s genitals that at times it seems a more appropriate title for his memoir would have been ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father’s Penis?’ Morrison senior didn’t want friends to visit him in hospital; when he got home he boarded up the window in the front door. ‘To be stalled and stranded ...”

“... that was unreal and that we were just characters in a play,’ Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, noted. More than any past presidential transition, Kennedy’s death and funeral, along with Johnson’s ascension to office, became a made-for-TV drama. Beginning with the first reports that Kennedy had been shot and up until the funeral three days later, the ...”

“... The publishers say that The Poetry of Edward Thomas is the first full-length study to deal exclusively with Thomas’s poetry (in Britain, they must mean). On the face of it, a six-decade gap of this sort shows a strange failure in critical husbandry. Yet it is not really so surprising ...”

“... proportion to the success of a first novel – though it might simply be that those cases are more prominent. (J.K. Rowling, suffering from the much rarer condition of Fifth Novel Anxiety Syndrome, seems to have got the message, and has applied for planning permission to add a little room to her large house in Edinburgh to help her rediscover the ...”

“... programme would be welcomed by the editor, too, allowing him to lead a richer, fuller life and see more of his children . . . Good writers lean on editors; they would not think of publishing something that no editor had read. Bad writers talk about the inviolable rhythm of their prose. Hard for an editor to read that without smiling. Writers who think it ...”

“... The story of Doubting Thomas, examined at length in this learned and fascinating book, has its origin in a brief passage near the end of St John’s Gospel. After the crucifixion, when the disciples were assembled behind locked doors ‘for fear of the Jews’, Jesus appeared among them and displayed the wounds in his hands and side ...”

“... bibliophile. Between 1495 and his death in 1515, Aldus issued from his Venice press more first editions of classical texts than had ever been published before, and more than anyone has published since. With his punchcutter, Francesco Griffo, he designed an elegant new typeface for printing in Greek (a serious ...”

“... pyrotechnic genealogical loops of the pagan gods, but it also illustrates the problem of genealogy more generally. Where to start and who to include? The Gospel of Luke takes the lineal patriarchal story back to Adam, which makes us all Sons of Man, if not of David in particular. Matthew starts with Abraham and arranges the ancestors in three neat ...”