“... cuisines, and often deeply serious, as in his frank and affectionate profiles of Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden, Alan Davidson and Christopher Driver. Above all, he has an endearingly amateur – in both senses – quality. Symptomatic of this is a detail volunteered by Ann Barr in her introduction. She tells us, with a pregnant use of the ...”

“... face and then drawing from it: the Librarian, for example. Our new sculptors – Edward Allington, David Mach, Tony Cragg – give us the set-up pure and simple. There are 21 articles in this book, one of which samples a further 16 texts. Those by Sven Alfons, R.J.W. Evans, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, and Piero Falchetta are the most useful, as they enable the ...”

“... stories as words are at conveying pictures. An observer who had not already heard the story of David and Goliath would see in the Speculum picture nothing more specific than a king who has just cut off the head of a giant (the latter identified not so much by his size as by his club). Indeed, even if one does already know a story, it is by no means always ...”

“... called Miqbal, Abdullah, Hana and Najiba were naming their children Gladys, George, Pauline and David (as well as the all-American ‘Junior’). Yet of all the Shadid and Samara descendants only Anthony felt compelled to return to Marjayoun. Rooting himself in the soil of his family history, he hoped, would compensate for the peripatetic life of the ...”

“... with accounts of visits to Adolf Grünbaum in Pittsburgh, to Richard Swinburne in Oxford, to David Deutsch in Headington, to John Leslie in Canada, to Derek Parfit, again in Oxford. He meets Roger Penrose in New York, has phone conversations with Steven Weinberg and John Updike. These conversations become a way of evoking possibilities as much as seeking ...”

“... for its innovations and its geniuses and scoff at it for thinking it invented human nature. (David Hume, late of that parish, invented human understanding, or a treatise of that name, and that’s quite different.) Meanwhile, we can love Glasgow for its rebel spirit and its demotic energy while noting the piousness of Bearsden and Milngavie. Scotland ...”

“... with wartime controls was an aberration. (Wartime America was much less obedient.) Cartoon by David Langdon for ‘Punch’, November 1949. Mark Roodhouse’s answer to the crude question of just how much black market activity there was in Britain, both during the war and in the period of postwar austerity, is that, though widespread, it was far less so ...”

“... of annotating any Paterian text. The general editors of the new Oxford edition, Lesley Higgins and David Latham, have embarked on the project with bravura: ‘The ten volumes of The Collected Works of Walter Pater are commissioned to serve scholars as the definitive edition for at least as long as the unscholarly 1910 Library Edition has served.’ Volumes III ...”

“... knocked on the classroom door asking to be let in. I happened to be in a politics lesson when David Cameron was declared the new leader of the Conservative Party in December 2005 (‘He’ll never get it,’ our teacher had said a few weeks previously). I was there again in May 2007 when Tony Blair announced he was stepping down as prime minister and ...”

“... one of several umbrellas, is adjusting the noose. Powell’s co-conspirators, George Atzerodt and David Herold, still have their heads free: their expressions – private reckoning, a kind of baffled fear – are legible on their faces. A large man in a white coat and Panama hat is fussing round them, carrying with him the incongruous atmosphere of a summer ...”

“... of leadership – in other words, don’t worry, the menfolk are keeping Arlene right. Challenging David Davis to ‘stand up to the EU’, Ian Paisley Jr declared in the House of Commons that ‘It’s about time the government displayed a no surrender attitude – stand up to them, man!’ Sammy Wilson, the DUP member for East Antrim, agreed and spoke of ...”

“... twice a year. But Trump, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, his Israel adviser, Jason Greenblatt, and David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel (or Israel’s ambassador to the US – I find I’m confused), have given Israelis a free pass to go on imagining the post-conflict future in terms of the present overwhelming power imbalance between Israel and ...”

“... that successive Tory leaders have stuck to it. The 0.7 per cent figure was reached in 2013, on David Cameron’s watch, an achievement regarded with pride. Theresa May, on the eve of her departure from Downing Street, went out of her way to reaffirm the commitment. Even Boris Johnson is standing by it – for now. The promise that DFID will remain a ...”

“... it, because not understanding it in scientific terms is not to understand it at all, but David Bodanis, the author of E=mc2, is not one of them. As someone to whom science has always been a black hole, I see Bodanis and those who bother to try to explain to the likes of me what they understand mathematically as therapists of a sort. Not to understand ...”

“... as well as more representative of the state of 16th-century history: Natalie Zemon Davis, David Cressy, Eamon Duffy. More privately, there is the story he tells us in his prologue about his acceding, if sheepishly, to the unspoken wishes of his dead father by saying Kaddish for him. Which seems a more human response than his refusal, recorded in the ...”