“... about middle-aged women suffering. They were Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), John McGahern’s The Barracks (1961) and Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down (1966). It is no coincidence, either, that the best novels about men in the period after independence dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett ...”

“... In the north-west corner of Russell Square, on an extension to the School of Oriental and African Studies, a neatly lettered stone plaque attached to a nicely detailed brown brick wall reads: THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON HEREBY RECORDS ITS SINCERE APOLOGIES THAT THE PLANS OF THIS BUILDING WERE SETTLED WITHOUT DUE CONSULTATION WITH THE RUSSELL FAMILY AND THEIR TRUSTEES AND THEREFORE WITHOUT THEIR APPROVAL OF ITS DESIGN Directly below it a metal triangle records the Civic Trust award the building won in 1998 ...”

“... in the rock-leaved Bible of geology’. Those were the words of the pioneering geologist John Wesley Powell, who led the first expedition through the Grand Canyon in 1873. Thomas Moran, an experienced painter from Philadelphia, travelled with Powell, and had been to Wyoming and Montana with the US Geological and Geographical Survey two years ...”

“... to sit on so that at least I could force a smile’), Prescott and his bulimia. Cherie Blair and John Prescott may not have been the most unpopular figures of Blair’s government but they were the two who had the hardest time in the press. Both spent long stretches in the contemporary equivalent of the stocks; a scarring experience, and both of them were ...”

“... is lucky not to get eaten as well. Franklin’s famous expedition in Victorian times to find the North-West Passage is the theme of ‘The Age of Lead’, a tale which turns pollution into a bracing kind of art. Recently dug up from the permafrost, their surprised faces shown on TV, the members of the expedition died, it seems, of lead poisoning from the ...”

“... on a newspaper called the Caledonian that is so obviously the Scotsman (even down to the North Bridge office building) that one wonders why the author bothered with a pseudonym. Colley (like Banks) is a disciple of the ‘blessed St Hunter’ (a Scotsman detail that does not ring entirely true). As part of his Fear and Loathing in Midlothian act, the ...”

“... of a future conversion. Freud, indeed, was depressed by the cheerful reception of his ideas in North America because it proved that Americans had underestimated them, failing to see how disruptive they really were of all moral and social certainties. The stubborn Cartesians of France, on the other hand, unwilling to have their trust in the dignity and ...”

“... Leff says that he resembled Lenin by confusing mental categories with real life. After a trip north to cause trouble in the school of Laon, Abelard comes back to Paris, perhaps under the auspices of King Louis’s chancellor Stephen de Garlande, to set up his own school in the cloister of Notre Dame. He becomes famous as the wizard of logic, launches the ...”

“... are forced to make choices without having the knowledge that would enable us to make them; or, as John Gray has put it: ‘We are forced to live as if we were free.’ Joseph Stiglitz recently wrote that, although there is a growing consensus among economists that any bailout based on Henry Paulson’s plan won’t work, ‘it is impossible for politicians to ...”

“... William Cobbett of Rural Rides, a farmer’s son and himself a farmer from time to time; John Muir of My First Summer in the Sierra, a farmer’s son and farmer; and Lewis Grassic Gibbon of A Scots Quair, a farmer’s son from the Mearns in north-east Scotland. All three produced work that strikes me as special ...”

“... book is interesting on the poverty and parental illnesses which dominated Gascoigne’s straitened North-Eastern childhood, and interesting also on the patterns of truculent, rebellious sensitivity which have characterised his relation with all types of authority: otherwise, Gazza! is pretty routine stuff. Unlike its subject. The new England manager recently ...”

“... better footage from their news helicopter. A shoot-out takes place in which Clarice’s friend John Brigham (who has, by the way, coached her to three successive interservice combat pistol championships) is killed, as is one of the two BATF agents who are anti-realistically called Burke and Hare. Clarice kills five baddies, including Evelda Drumgo ...”

“... was a provincial, from Figeac in the South-West, whose brains and ambition eventually drew him north, in the best Napoleonic tradition, to Paris and the Collège de France. He was first smitten with ancient Egypt, and the hieroglyphs that gave it so literally graphic a fascination, when he was a small boy. At the age of 11, having moved to Grenoble, he got ...”

“... years during which he developed a practice in the unglamorous area of personal injury cases on the North-Western Circuit, and took silk. His gambling and drinking problems assumed Hogarthian proportions: at one moment he is pawning his wife’s wedding ring, at another he invites thirty people back to his place for drinks, at a third he is in an illegal ...”

“... which was brilliant.’ But there are some great little sketches, as when Alan Clark is added to a North London dinner party as a last-minute guest. The Braggs arrived and Melvyn was horrified. He said he loathed Alan C. Alan and Jane arrived in one of his Bentleys, which could barely squeeze through the two lines of parked cars outside. They came to the ...”