“... 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 ...”

“... In the sweet by and by We shall meet on that beautiful shore … And our spirits shall sorrow no more. In Denmark, cowed into subservient neutrality since August 1914, the Illustreret Tidende dared to write that ‘the disaster was caused by a deliberate act of will on the part of a warmongering nation.’ The Norwegian Morgenbladet was sharper: ‘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 ...”

“... his wife, to an open rehearsal of the Missa Solemnis, a work which would figure in Doctor Faustus more than twenty years later. ‘My chief impression,’ he wrote, ‘was of a remarkably handsome young man, Slavic in appearance and wearing a sort of Russian costume, with whom I established a kind of contact at a distance, since he noted my interest in him ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of architects with painters and sculptors as equal contributors to building projects, so that the more abstract practical and symbolic elements of architecture were enhanced and reinforced by figural narratives and allegories. Rykwert offers no actual examples of this prelapsarian practice in The Judicious Eye; it is left to the reader to imagine what he has ...”

“... were anyway sacked after 15 months. Not being a minister has given the former Young Conservative more time for writing. His 24th book is Neighbours from Hell: The Politics of Behaviour (Politico’s, £8.99). As its subtitle suggests, it isn’t a spin-off from the television programme of the same name, but a tract on anti-social behaviour, its supposed ...”