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“... between the wartime austerity they labour under and the cornucopia he revels in. He’s no more despicably selfish than any other of the characters, however; perhaps less so – after all, he gave up on his fellow citizens only after they wouldn’t let him help them. Acharnians is in some sense an ‘anti-war’ play, but it’s not of course ...”

“... has made me wonder about old forms of timekeeping. Did they serve to make the passing of time more bearable? Did almanacs, with their cycles of the moon and the stars, red letter days and anniversaries, or breviaries and Books of Hours, with their feasts and saints’ days, help distinguish one day from the next ...”

“... At the end of a recent and refreshingly untypical poem R.S. Thomas, recalling his sea-captain father, addresses him where he lies in his grave:               And I, can I accept your voyages are done; that there is no tide high enough to float you off this mean shoal of plastic and trash? We have heard something like this before, in more reverberant metre: But thrown upon this filthy modern tide And by its formless spawning fury wrecked ...”

“... a few dollars, one per honest reader per pre-prepared episode. Money for old rope, to buy King more time. Those less famous than King who fancy getting published online can apply to author-direct.co.uk, a new website launched at the Hay-on-Wye festival in May. It goes live some time this month. Laurence Middleton Jones, the company’s managing ...”

“... is ‘like being a grown-up caught picking your nose and eating it’. For Jacqui Smith, it was more a case of the entire country walking in on her husband having a wank. Then there’s Dennis Bates, who according to the Telegraph has been giving tax advice to his wife, the Labour MP Meg Munn, and several of her colleagues, including the foreign ...”

“... in Short Cuts), you could be forgiven for thinking there ought to be a referendum on the matter. A more interesting poll would unearth how many people think Kilroy-Silk already is the leader of Ukip, since there’s little doubt that his tanned presence on the campaign trail, aided by other fading celebrity ghouls such as Joan Collins, is largely responsible ...”

“... never again to expose myself to the chance of such an indignity.’ The story isn’t made any more plausible by Conan Doyle’s clunking attempts to establish the commonsensical reliability of his narrator: ‘As a medical man, I know that a nightmare is simply a vascular derangement of the cerebral hemispheres.’ It’s all too easy to sympathise with ...”

“... 950 passwords from a naval weapons station, perhaps the US should think twice about paying Boeing more than $100 billion to supply and manage the Future Combat Systems (FCS) project, which will connect every soldier, pilot, gun, radio and missile in the US military to a giant ‘global information grid’. The UK is planning a similar programme, known as the ...”

“... Professor of Law at the University of Oklahoma, and of her adversary, Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas, and of his Senate sponsor, John Danforth, and of his most effective champion on the Senate Judicial Committee, the fearsomely-named and viciously forensic Arlen Spector. On 11 October, when Professor Hill began her televised allegations, this was the only ...”

“... thinking it was. Indeed, the implication that the most he has to sacrifice is his job tells you more than you might want to know about his (and many other politicians’) priorities. Media bosses, by contrast, seem not to be able to abandon ship quickly enough. Piers Morgan, like Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies before him, was out of a job as soon as it was ...”

“... invited five bright, young writers with a healthy clutch of novels between them, all more or less friends of mine, to write stories of a pornographic nature for which they would receive £250 each.’ Direct, conversational, ‘honest’, and then there’s that studied mention of money which is followed by a hesitant attack on the ...”

“... Martin Amis Project’. There are plenty of references in Dead Babies to other films, a more or less obligatory practice these days. Giles’s mad mother lives at Castle Howard (a.k.a. Brideshead), and at one point Johnny the psycho is about to blow the lock off a door with a shotgun when he thinks better of it and instead smashes in one of the ...”

“... would probably be called ‘The CEO’, princes these days having rather less power and rather more time on their hands than they used to. The heir to the English throne, for example, has recently been enjoying An Englishman in Paris: l’éducation continentale by Michael Sadler (Simon and Schuster, £10). On 14 April Charles wrote Sadler a letter, duly ...”

“... stereotypical national costume of the country they’re visiting, which of course only makes them more conspicuous. Their regular garb is stereotypically Belgian: dark suit, heavy shoes, Magrittean bowler hat. The stories Hergé produced during the Nazi occupation of Belgium were, necessarily, not concerned with high politics. He has often been accused of ...”

“... get up early (‘if you get up one hour earlier than other people you get thirty hours a month more life than they do’); and ‘clear out all dirty matter from inside your stomach . . . by having a "rear” daily’. A remarkably frank passage on the perils of self-abuse – ‘you all know what it is to have at times a pleasant feeling in your private ...”