“... state of constitutional anarchy’. ‘It really is time,’ he urged, ‘that we in this country took our constitution seriously.’ All too often, Wilberforce complained, Britain muddled through in constitutional matters ‘with a fuzzy kind of reliance upon convention’. Devolution, he feared, might throw up issues that were less easily settled, and he ...”

“... and largely persisted until very recently, when geological exploration by Jelle de Boer and John Hale revealed two major faultlines under the shrine, together with the presence of ethylene gas. Not only was the bituminous limestone sufficiently fissured to allow the gas to rise to the surface through the Kassotis spring water (which the Pythia ...”

“... are alleged to belong to the ancient Sabean sect whose worshippers give primacy as a prophet to John the Baptist. Depending on the nature of what they are asked to do, I’m told, witches and sorcerers charge at least $400 for a spell or a curse, though the better-known ones can command up to $6000. Spells relate to marriage, love, divorce, good health, job ...”

“... Being​ much plagued by insomnia, some years ago I took to reading, as I tried to drift off to sleep, a collection of dialogues recovered from the flight recorders of crashed aeroplanes. These transcripts, rendered on the page in conventional dramatic format, followed a uniform narrative arc: a mishmash of cockpit directions, communication with air traffic control, and with passengers and stewardesses, banal chit-chat about family or food (Krispy Kreme donuts seem to be a favourite of US pilots) suddenly giving way to concern about an unexpected bang or shudder or an unresponsive flap or lever; rapidly escalating to blind panic as the situation turns critical; then, inevitably, the same denouement ...”

“... Back-Bone of an Eel’. And then the rabbits began to appear.A local apothecary and obstetrician, John Howard, was the first person outside her immediate circle to examine Toft. He said he felt something ‘leaping’ in her womb. Under his supervision in Guildford, she went on to deliver a large number of dead rabbits, nine in a single day. Howard wrote ...”

“... but the arguments that got us there were mostly neoliberal ones. Reformers said that non-smokers took fewer sick days, fewer breaks; they rarely referred to smoking as a public health problem that might have something to do with class and racial inequality, lack of education, or unemployment. Yielding to or breaking the smoking habit was all about ...”

“... soon veered towards compassion: ‘Du Maurier book upsets family and friends’. But most people took sides. Things came to a head after a programme about du Maurier on TV, called The Loving Heart after one of her novels. It was unremarkable in itself but several of the participants got wound up into declaring afterwards that they hadn’t said she ...”

“... as a setting for sculpture are the consequences of a single-minded pursuit by its main architect, John Russell Pope, of its underlying purpose, which was to provide a famous dealer in need of respectability, Lord Duveen, with a chance to display his munificence on a colossal scale. So the space seems designed to diminish any person or thing that enters ...”

“... out that Lonrho was breaking sanctions against the illegal regime in Rhodesia. The Foreign Office took the view that although sanctions-busting was all very well for oil companies and banks, it was not very wise where a member of the Royal Family was concerned. Ogilvy and Rowland parted like sorrowful lovers. Today Ogilvy’s Who’s Who entry does not ...”

“... impressive. During his lifetime he was known, above all, as the editor of the Encyclopédie, which took up most of his time between 1751 and 1765. He probably regarded himself as primarily a philosophe, in the sense of being someone who challenged accepted orthodoxies on any subject under the sun and looked for the assumptions behind what were presented as the ...”

“... that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most Western of splendid bridges ... took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.’ We know all about those traditions. This is the realm of the incalculable, bloodthirsty Other; the Other of our dreams, of course, the figure we compose out of everything we can’t or wont know about ...”

“... from the papers. It tells the story, then, of two English girls, aged seven and five, whose mother took them on the hippy trail to Morocco in the Sixties. The woman – ‘Mum’, as she is called with inaccurate cosiness’ – is calmly presented to the reader as a typical middle-class hippy of those years: irresponsible, self-indulgent, dishonest and not ...”

“... marriages, television sets and cartons of milk. One thinks of Garrison Keillor, David Leavitt, and John Updike, whose most luminous descriptions are located in ‘the post-pill paradise’ of pleasure, estrangement and divorce. Thus the ‘normal’, whether a word, a category or a quality, loses its Larkinesque dullness and takes on an impossibly romantic ...”

“... on the night before. Elderly troubleshooters have tended to be just that in America – shooters. John Wayne in True Grit creaked in the saddle, aimed straight, and punched people in the usual places. He uttered platitudes, but at least they were home-grown platitudes. Why was it felt necessary to dress Mr Van Cleef in preposterous robes, issue him with a ...”

“... 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 ...”