“... been more misleading than this one. Nor is it just a question of writers like Proust and Mann, who may be said to belong to the last flowering of the 19th century. In the 1980s the tradition of setting a certain kind of novel ‘one generation back’ in time remains as vital as ever. We are accustomed to the paradox that most people’s notions of the texture ...”

“... editor of The New Select Committees, points out in his introduction, ‘the purpose of a report may be to influence a government department, or another public sector agency, or to provide information for MPs to use in a forthcoming Parliamentary debate.’ But how then are the committees to be judged? Is the right yardstick their impact on Government ...”

“... the wealth of information, I cannot reconcile Jones’s picture with my reading of Chaucer. Now it may be, as Jones would certainly argue, that this is just prejudice on my part: this is how I have always seen the Knight, and I’m unwilling to change my mind. Tone is always a difficult thing to discuss and an impossible thing to prove. Yet it is not wholly ...”

“... at least be delayed until the screening. These two books remind us that technological developments may change the terms of the power equation, not only in broadcasting but also in the press. It is more than five centuries since Gutenberg invented movable type and so enabled printing to be developed on a mass scale. It was estimated that before Gutenberg a few ...”

“... memory that a policeman never loses – no matter how senior he becomes’. Meanwhile the reader may be somewhat puzzled to know, first, how Mountbatten came to believe that the post of Commissioner of police for London was in his personal gift, and secondly why, if so, he decided to bestow it on a man whom he had never previously met. In fact, McNee did not ...”

“... individually rational can be jointly damaging, and also that when the parties know that fact, they may still have good reason to follow them. These issues, and many others of the same kind which he discusses, have a good deal to do with politics. Parfit makes it clear that they do, but he does not for the most part discuss them as though they did. The ...”

“... of political antibiotics. The degree to which the IRA in general, or Mr Gerry Adams in particular, may have been responsible for this or that outrage is largely a matter of theology. It is not just that the IRA – and indeed most similar para-military organisations on either side of the Northern conflict – have a well-known track record of evading ...”

“... than Sweeney could ever have managed. Armitage has a lot of fun with Robinson: the reader may not quite share his enthusiasm, or see this persona’s significance, though there are memorable moments, particularly in ‘Mr Robinson’s Holiday’, where his meanness has a number of comic consequences and where he is promoted, as he walks on a moonlit ...”

“... by modern standards, is the equivalent of Edward Jenner’s first trials of vaccination. In May 1796, he took material from a pustule on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a dairymaid who had cowpox, and placed that fluid on incisions made in the arm of James Phipps. A later attempt to inoculate Phipps with smallpox failed. The comparison with HIV not as ...”

“... need-to-tell, what John Updike has diagnosed as an urge ‘to cover the world in fiction’. Money may have been the definitive portrait of Eighties materialism, but Amis has a sly suspicion that we haven’t yet tired of reading about the things we cannot get too much of – like fame and money, sex and information. Amis’s latest anti-hero suffers from too ...”

“... by the frost, feuilles d’automne galette, as one might say. But, to return to our muttons, it may well be that pommes galette are done in the same sort of way as these Pommes Anna, but with melted cheese. Anything by Barbara Pym reminds us how much pleasure food in fiction, or at least in a literary context, can give; and it suggests that the experience ...”

“... to pieces. Many items show signs of wear, indicating that they were in use for a long time, and may have been family heirlooms, but there are also tong marks, indicating that pommels were wrenched off forcibly. Clear incisions on some of the pieces suggest that there was no great time gap between the disassembly and the burial, and it’s unlikely that ...”

“... Though he usually couldn’t cure, a physician could take good care, and a 20th-century reader may envy all the extended house-calls described here and the assiduous vigilance at the bedside – not to mention, in the earlier decades at least, the generous use of opium. (Fears of working-class addiction led to severe restrictions on the drug later ...”

“... and his throat had been cut. The body was discovered at 7 p.m. on 28 April; the autopsy was on 1 May. A week later samples and data were Fedexed to Goff’s Hawaii home – crime scene photos, insects from the body, soil samples and local weather information. On 14 May, he phoned in his final conclusions: the victim had ...”

“... the same, Shakespeare, for instance, can’t have known anything at all about Norse myth. Hamlet may, as O’Donoghue claims, go back to the story of Frodi’s mill and the giantess-slaves who grind at a magic stone there, as told in one of the few Eddic poems outside the bishop’s Codex Regius, and Hamlet’s feigned madness ...”