“... I’m on a Facebook group called ‘Composting, just composting’ where there’s always one guy – that’s me here, I guess – going on about his compost being so hot. (I’ve also seen male birds do this: the Australian brush-turkey, Alectura lathami, scratches together a car-sized mound of leaf litter and manages to compost it at the perfect ...”

“... was not the MTV white-outs, when the editor lost his nerve and tried to get fancy – wasn’t the guy who provided the footage working in the music industry? – or the fine gestural rubber-glove-acting of the surgeon, hampered, the way an actor can be, by trying to act in a white sack. What annoyed me was the way they got their aliens wrong. I sort America ...”

“... want to wear socks with sandals. About two hundred yards from the gate entry is procured from a guy charging £20 to stamp you with the entry pass. Another half-mile hike to the Stone Circle, where I’d arranged to meet people; ‘let’s meet at the Stone Circle’ has a better ring to it than ‘see you down the pub.’People met, bags dumped in the ...”

“... about the Thing but the Thing Itself’. Donoghue’s Stevens fulfils his role of Emersonian fall-guy admirably, but should be classified under ‘Ideas about the Thing’ rather than ‘the Thing Itself’. Donoghue doesn’t always come down on the side of belief for belief’s sake, and he offers a spirited defence of Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ against ...”

“... Dead Sea Poems. Although it was published in 1995, this is very much a millennial poem: the last Guy Fawkes bonfire of 1999 turns into something unexpectedly apocalyptic and life-changing (‘a people waiting for a word or sign’). This bonfire was a spectacle sufficiendy powerful (‘take notice of its changing shape: a cairn/becoming wigwam, then becoming ...”

“... for the 1968-69 tour to South Africa, leading to the tour’s cancellation by a furious John Vorster – aroused such strong emotions. There was never any doubt that Vorster’s government had acted abominably, but what hurt just as much was the suspicion – always ringingly denied by the English cricket establishment – that they had deliberately ...”

“... from time to time exhibit selected Screen Tests. The idea was already in the air. The neo-dadaist, John Cage-influenced Fluxus artists were already making similar perversely conceptual films. At least a year before Warhol began documenting faces for The 13 Most Beautiful Boys, the Icelandic political pop artist Erró, then based in New York, was at work on a ...”

“... summoned. His lofty earlier debates on the Agony in the Garden and Cain and Abel with his friend John Colet would have remained unknown – Colet was not one to rush into print – if Erasmus had not written them up and got them into circulation. If Colet’s new St Paul’s School was known abroad, it was Erasmus’s doing. Even Jean Vitrier, coming to ...”

“... in Action. Entirely absent, or mentioned only in passing, are Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Yoo, Elliott Abrams, Ahmed Chalabi, Ayad Allawi, Rick Santorum, Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, Richard Armitage, Katherine Harris, Ken Mehlman, Paul O’Neill, Rush Limbaugh. Barely appearing at all are John Ashcroft, Samuel ...”

“... an ancient word for ‘shit’, or something equally repulsive). Scarnsea’s physician, Brother Guy of Malton, a Spanish moor worried about the position of immigrant monks in a post-monastic society, asks: ‘What has this house become?’ Shardlake replies: ‘You might as well ask what a country England has become.’ The English have reclaimed their ...”

“... field for a woman. Its policy on female employees was unusually egalitarian. When Matheson met John Reith, the first director-general, through her work for Astor, he recruited her to be director of talks on the phenomenal salary of £900 a year. She was 38 and unmarried, fully formed as a character. Yet the Matheson of this period remains, despite her ...”

“... maybe more than just as an editor. His narrative is entirely about being taken seriously by Elton John, Princess Diana, George Michael, Anthea Turner, Richard Branson, Paul McCartney, Patsy Kensit, Ian Botham, Jordan, Mohammed al Fayed, Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. (If there are names in that list you haven’t heard ...”

“... was more to all this than shared churchmanship. In a celebrated comparison between Andrewes and John Donne, Eliot maintained that Andrewes was a ‘medieval’ rather than a ‘modern’ writer. He valued Andrewes because his magnificently dense prose subordinated personality to the demands of text, community and tradition. Andrewes bypassed subjective ...”

“... manageable while shutting out the pain. After a visit to Dublin, he reported to his close friend John Hayward that ‘you would hardly recognise my usually reticent self there: all the Curzon-like aloofness which has been so useful in other contexts, is dropped and a mask of playful blarney is assumed.’* There is self-satire as well as self-knowledge ...”

“... was a Bible-banging fundamentalist. When officials in Dayton, Tennessee decided to roast John Scopes for teaching evolution in 1925, they called in the ageing Bryan to prosecute. The week-long trial became a national sensation and reached its climax when the defence attorney, Clarence Darrow, called Bryan to the stand and eviscerated his Biblical ...”