“... are successful abroad is that they shall give a leg up to their fellow-countrymen. A few do so; Peter Porter has been most generous, and Clive James has come to the task more recently, but also with generosity. In this vivacious and often sumptuous new collection of his essays, he has a great deal to say in praise of fellow expatriates, and some magnanimous ...”

“... towards Darwinism and the science’s wider nationalistic uses. Uses have never been central to Peter Bowler’s work: indeed, in the past he has had a bone to pick with Edinburgh sociologists who promoted an instrumental approach to science. Nonetheless in his sturdy account of Theories of Human Evolution he, too, looks at the wider cultural and racial ...”

“... who were expelled from Zillertal in 1837 for obstinate Protestantism and given sanctuary by the King of Prussia. In the only photograph I have of his family, my great-grandfather Gustav stands straight and Prussian-cropped in his shabby uniform. (Gustav died when I was four and he was ninety: he had every tooth in his head, white and without cavities ...”

“... Hall, American Graffiti, Star Wars, Harold and Maude, Two-Lane Blacktop, Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, Badlands. These are the movies reviewed by Lane that he lists: Indecent Proposal, Sleepless in Seattle, Speed, Wolf, Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, Braveheart, The Bridges of Madison County, Crash, Con ...”

“... even Neville Chamberlain might have blushed. We learn this not from Blair’s memoirs, but from Peter Mandelson’s, which provide a much more complete account of the Blair/Brown relationship (they are also much easier to read, since Mandelson has no problem telling his story in chronological order).* Mandelson reveals that Blair frequently pledged to ‘do ...”

“... the Turkish sack of Constantinople and the rise of Protestantism. He had predicted the reign of Peter the Great and Frederick the Great. Tantalisingly for Greeks in the 1750s, he also offered a vision of what awaited their descendants: an ‘era of destruction of the Mohammedans’ and the resurrection of an Orthodox empire with the help of the ‘kings of ...”

“... endorses the hyper-sceptical ‘biblical minimalism’ of Philip Davies, Thomas Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche, which regards such findings as irrelevant since, as they see it, the early history of Israel is actually a fiction that returnees from the Babylonian exile made up after the sixth century BCE. Sand seems unaware of the conflict between the two views ...”

“... cosy: Jacobson uses fiction with force and delicacy to alienate it and make it strange. Yonadab, King David’s nephew, the narrator of The Rape of Tamar, observes dryly on the last page that history has recently been invented by Abiathar the priest, whom Biblical scholars have named ‘The Court Historian’. A remarkable man, Abiathar. A truly original ...”

“... 13 January. One of Peter Cook’s jokes, several times quoted in his obituaries, is of two men chatting. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ says one, whereupon the other says: ‘Yes, neither am I.’ And of course it’s funny and has a point, except that Peter, I suspect, felt that this disposed of the matter entirely ...”

“... the early modern sense of receipts, or texts received: ‘Fine Sauce for a roasted Rabbet: used to king Henry the eight’; ‘To comfort the heart, and take away Melancholy’; ‘To make red sealing Waxe’; ‘Marmalad of Quinces’; ‘To make Oile of Earth wormes … good for the sinews that are cold’; ‘To bake a Capon with yolks of Eggs’; ‘To ...”

“... with Britain, formed on a visit of nine months in the retinue of the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia in 1814 – enough for him to declare that the stuffed giraffes in the British Museum, which he visited soon after reaching London on his second visit, were apt symbols of British taste. His generalisations about the English are more negative than ...”

“... only the West that goes Wah! – than from the helpful introduction to Fresco by the panglossian Peter Constantine, who supplies some historical and cultural background. Lleshanaku’s poems have a flavour and a feeling and a world, but they’re not such that you would back yourself to make her life story out of them. So it is from Constantine that we learn ...”

“... and Spender and his then wife Inez, were Auden and Isherwood, their new boyfriends, and Peter Pears as co-host with Britten. The stickiness – clearly a source of great amusement to Coldstream and Spender – lay in the tensions between the lifestyles of the people concerned, and the frustration felt by Auden and Isherwood – naturally dominant ...”

“... at the hands of the Courtenays in 1455. And if one Lancastrian knight of the shire, Sir Peter Bessels of Berkshire, took the then highly unusual initiative of sponsoring a new monastic college at Oxford, the heretical religious interests of Sir John Oldcastle led to his being burned while hanging (presumably still alive) in St Giles’s Fields in ...”

“... to study the menu. The older man now assumed a joke Indian accent, of the kind popularised by Peter Sellers in the early 1960s. ‘Well I never, they have Bangladeshi Fruit Salad, that is very nice indeed.’ In his normal voice, he continued: ‘Right – well, we will most certainly sample your King Prawn Curry, for a ...”