“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... one end of it – cash – and Germs (not the most engaging title, admittedly) at the other: far more worth publishing for its own sake than most books that see their way into print. When a press gets it right, the moneyspinners subsidise the books that are worth publishing for other than commercial reasons. Many try to do this, but since the collapse of the ...”

“... unfinished, ever open. It can be indefinitely added to, rewritten, cut from, commented on. But more than that, a blog should be dense with hyperlinks, sending the reader off into the blogosphere and the rest of the internet along a chain of endlessly forking paths. That may well sound like your idea of a nightmare, which is just one of the many reasons the ...”

“... pure habit by this time, on the off-chance something will bite. He likes talking, but he likes sex more, and he never strays too far away. Here’s an example. James led to Edith Wharton, and that reminded Vidal of R.W.B. Lewis’s book, which mentioned that she’d met a smoldering young writer in Italy named Alberto Moravia. So Vidal called Moravia to ask if ...”

“... and 18th-century still lifes: dead hares are a motif at the Wallace Collection, and you’re now more likely to come across a hare in art than you are anywhere else. The appetite has gone. Turner fished and shot not because he was conspicuous and wanted to show off but because he wasn’t and he didn’t: he was essentially frugal and self-sufficient, for ...”

“... for good plots. The best conspiracy-theory novels – Gravity’s Rainbow, for example – contain more fact than at first seems credible. But lots of people are dispiritingly willing to believe any old nonsense. This doesn’t much matter when the nonsense is The Da Vinci Code. It’s more of a problem when it’s something ...”

“... rules have had to be relaxed to include his descendants, as it turns out that the planet is even more promiscuous than the god was: according to the last count, it has at least 38 moons. ‘At some time in the future,’ the IAU warns, ‘it may be advisable to stop naming very small satellites.’ Most of Uranus’s satellites are named after characters in ...”

“... at the same time. Not so much a marketing disaster as a triumph, I’d say. In its own, rather more modest way, the ‘long awaited motorists’ driving manual’ 1288 (BBS, 317 pp., £18.99, 3 May 2000, 1 903029 00 7) by Derek Bracegirdle subverts certain assumptions, too. (I don’t understand the title.) The book, ‘probably the most ...”

“... meant to kill zombies and zombies are meant to kill people, but there are players who think it’s more fun to attack their own kind. People who kill people are known as PKers. You can pick up objects of varying degrees of usefulness: baseball bats, bottles of beer, fire axes, first-aid kits, mobile phones, pistols, shotguns, spray cans etc. If you have a ...”

“... took over Piazza San Giuseppe to harangue a small crowd of supporters and passers-by. It was a far more modest affair than Berlusconi’s big-city extravaganzas: no young lovelies in their scanties, just a man with a megaphone. ‘Security is the first right of every citizen,’ he proclaimed, before accusing the left of stealing ideas from the right. He had a ...”