“... Boss is doing more than merely refusing Republicans: he’s gone so far as to offer his support to John Kerry. Other ageing rockers joining him on the Vote for Change tour of battleground states include R.E.M., James Taylor and Jackson Browne, with the Dixie Chicks – whose lead singer, Natalie Maines, got into trouble for saying that they were ashamed of ...”

“... Conan Doyle, whom one expects to sound like Basil Rathbone. In actual fact he sounds like Gordon Brown. It’s somehow easy to forget that Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, and his voice, recorded in 1930, is here filled with lilting plangencies about the age of materialism and the fact that death is not the end. He was right about that, about death not ...”

“... eyebrows. He had long, thick and even paintbrush-thick eyelashes. These, though, were a very dark brown. (‘They’re like those of Elizabeth Taylor,’ I thought. ‘Or maybe Montgomery Clift.’) His eyes, too, were very dark – but a very dark green. He was, moreover, articulate – speaking in full, proper sentences and using no, like, you ...”

“... the catalogue commentary requires the combined efforts of Colin Amery, Mary Lutyens, Jane Brown, John Cornforth, Gavin Stamp and John Summerson to do justice to an architect whose career, in its range, dimensions and achievements, outshines Wren, Vanbrugh and the Adam ...”

“... are tubs of geraniums and trellises thick with honey-suckle. He is a tall lean man whose reddish brown hair with odd threads of grey is cut into a boyish fringe. He wears tinted glasses and a tight navy shirt and trousers. He says he is a dark sort of individual … ‘very Celtic’. He looks grim and a little forbidding until he smiles. Around his neck ...”

“... embarrass things by presenting them as too small or too large. Rome is compared to a belly-button, brown trout sip at the stars and in ‘Sun and Moon’ (an elegy which becomes a kind of Creation story) the eponymous celestial bodies float on the same scale as ‘turtles and dolphins and fish’. There is no sense of awkwardness, of things too large or too ...”

“... disease. About thirty diseases have been identified, with a palette of names such as black band, brown band, pink spot and yellow blotch; not all their causes are known. Over the past decade or so, 90 per cent of the Caribbean’s Elkhorn coral – one of the main reef-building species – has died, mainly as a result of white pox, which causes the soft ...”

“... Where are the eager old gentlemen with their telescopes now? Stepping indifferently over scrawny brown thighs as they pick their way along the sea-front. Worth remembering, too, that Leander did not swim the Hellespont to win a wager or break a record, or even to sport in the waves with an Esther Williams girl, but solely because it was the best and indeed ...”

“... from the state, made out to my son, for £1024. The cheque isn’t actually signed by Gordon Brown, but it might as well be. The Child Trust Fund was a New Labour manifesto promise from 2001, passed into law in January 2005, giving every child born after 1 September 2002 a lump sum of £250, to compound until their eighteenth birthday. (My son qualified ...”

“... helps explain why Bevis Hillier has written an enormous biography of a dead English minor poet. John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love is the second volume of Hillier’s proposed trilogy and covers, roughly, the years 1933-58, the period when Betjeman, as Larkin put it, ‘became Betjeman’. The book is 736 pages long. Its predecessor, Young Betjeman, was 477 ...”

“... length in this learned and fascinating book, has its origin in a brief passage near the end of St John’s Gospel. After the crucifixion, when the disciples were assembled behind locked doors ‘for fear of the Jews’, Jesus appeared among them and displayed the wounds in his hands and side. He also granted them the power to remit sins, or not, as the spirit ...”

“... some mail through the bedroom window, among it a Jiffy bag with a book in it from a Dublin friend, John, the nephew I recall of the Unionist doctor who found that bronze pin all those years ago. In the book, Trees of Ireland: Native and Naturalised, I read under Hazel: ‘Fruit, a true nut, egg-shaped, up to 2cm long, pale green becoming ...”

“... muddy underfoot, an illicit delight. It’s warm and windless, the stones of the abbey sodden and brown from the amount of moisture they’ve absorbed. Spectacular here are the toilet arrangements, the reredorter set above a narrow chasm with a stream still running along the bottom. Unique, though (or at least I haven’t seen another), is the tannery ...”

“... a ‘folio Beaumont and Fletcher’ – an acquisition that he had saved up for by wearing his brown suit until it was threadbare. Both scared and enraptured, Elia had dithered until 10 p.m. on a Saturday before finally setting out to walk from Islington to the bookseller’s premises in Covent Garden. When he returned home, he insisted on collating and ...”

“... is after the crucifixion, when she stands at the foot of the cross with the Virgin Mary and John the Evangelist, and then goes to the tomb with embalming oils to care for Jesus’s body. In the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke there are several women involved, and they find the tomb empty except for an angel (sometimes two), with ‘a face like ...”