“... distinction of that earlier generation of fellows: not just AJPT and Lewis, but Bruce McFarlane, John Morris, Rupert Cross, Cyril Darlington, J.Z. Young, Sir Peter Medawar, Gilbert Ryle ... the line stretched on. No doubt it was all more humdrum in reality, but one was left with the impression of great intellectual giants inhabiting a world of mad English ...”

“... John Bayley’s new novel is largely about those who are had on, or taken in, and this may well include his readers, who need to keep their wits about them. To begin with, he conjures up a couple of innocents. There was an innocent, too, as hero in his last novel, In Another Country, published in 1955. But Oliver, a young officer with the British army of occupation, was a worrier and a sensitive, risking trouble for the sake of his German girlfriend, and contrasted with his hideously successful rival ...”

“... It was one of the more gratuitous blunders of John Foster Dulles when he was Secretary of State to respond to a question about the unwillingness of Saudi Arabia to allow any American Jew to set foot on Saudi soil by alluding to the Saudi conviction that a Jew had been responsible for the murder of the Prophet Muhammad ...”

“... contemporary deference to the power of market forces. The rare occasions when Burchfield puts his foot down are not much more satisfactory. Of ‘the regrettable type between you and I’ he writes that it ‘must be condemned at once. Anyone who uses it now lives in a grammarless cavern in which no distinction is recognised between a grammatical object and a ...”

“... snouts. From the boat, as a boy, I even saw a pike break water to catch a duck by its webbed foot as it tried to get airborne and then drag it under.I’m a fly fisherman now, a proud descendant forty million years removed of Denisova Man, who evolved out of his Siberian cave to walk upright in order to catch fish from the rivers and oceans, to scarf all ...”

“... into muscle and gristle and blood?’ Thus muses the first-person narrator of Life-Size, five foot two inches, weighing less than seventy pounds; Josie, a graduate student in economics, is far advanced along the line of self-starvation. Anorexia nervosa has her in its grip. She has gone far beyond temperance – the observation quoted above needn’t seem ...”

“... city of Agra, four hundred miles to the north, and it is a fairly safe bet that he had done so on foot. Coryate is not much heard of nowadays, but in his time he was famous. I have always been curious about him, and finding myself in India earlier this year I decided to visit some of the cities associated with his last journey, of which very little is ...”

“... the fact that Matthew and Mark record the last words of Jesus as spoken in Aramaic, while Luke and John offer a different version, in Greek. But although Mark, followed by Matthew, offers various sayings in Aramaic he immediately translates them into Greek. The evangelists were addressing not only Gentiles but the large number of Jews whose ordinary language ...”

“... resurrected for some time to come. Coincident with the end of socialism in any meaningful sense, John Gray tells us that ‘a liberal political philosophy is an impossibility,’ and Ted Honderich announces that Conservatism is a nullity. If both of them are right and can be taken at face value, there does not seem to be much left. Dr Gray’s original ...”

“... a gift from the patriarch of Jerusalem. Retracing his coronation route, Henry III processed on foot from St Paul’s to a Westminster Abbey undergoing reconstruction, where he was greeted by more than a hundred monks ‘tearfully singing and exulting’. In an echo of the hippos’ swamp, the Strand was so deep in mud in 1315 that Edward II signed an ...”

“... In 1738 John Rocque, a Frenchman, began his survey of London. His map (engraved by John Pine) covers an area from Marylebone and Chelsea in the west to Stepney and Deptford in the east. It was finally published in 1747. Pasted together, its 24 sheets measure 13 x 6 ½ feet – that is how it is shown in the exhibition London 1753 at the British Museum until 23 November ...”

“... ceremonial duties such as mounting a guard of honour for the arrival of the new governor, Hugh Foot. They also helped out in moments of difficulty, such as the emergency triggered in August 1951 by Hurricane Charlie. This was Jamaica’s greatest natural disaster of the 20th century, with 17 inches of rainfall in a few hours, gusts of 125 mph, more than ...”

“... off to the healing field, where one poor woman had the foulest job of the festival: she was giving foot massages to people who hadn’t bathed for at least two days. It may well have been that she was too spiritual to notice such things.Glastonbury has the reputation of being full of 16-year-olds from Winchester and terrible students intent on drinking ...”

“... of a mass of detail, as if the sheer weight of her protestations would convince the world that John, as she calls him, was not guilty. It doesn’t work, even though one agrees that the coroner’s verdict naming Lucan as the murderer was unfairly reached, and it must have been a heartbreaking task. Marnham’s book is more reflective and very much ...”

“... moment, that printing is straightforwardly duplicative. In one copy, a peacock gazes up from the foot of the page; in another, falcons and sparrows perch on flowering tendrils which, as they twist around the margins, teeter on the edge of abstraction. In fact, Gutenberg’s Bible would have looked a lot like a handwritten text to 15th-century eyes, not (as ...”