“... out of the small worlds mapped in Eating people is wrong and The British Museum is falling down. David Lodge’s latest, Paradise News, crosses at least ten time zones from Rummidge, over the Pacific Rim, to Hawaii. Doctor Criminale clocks up fewer frequent-flyer miles, but short-hauls hectically. The narrative opens in London, flies to Vienna, boards the ...”

“... remembered in flowing white robes by a girl from Glasgow: ‘the first grown-up I had ever seen wearing bare feet and sandals.’ The marriage was, eventually, consummated, and the first of four daughters was born in 1911. The family and her own work began to take up more and more of her attention. And he went on, in the spirit of Carpenter, making, in ...”

“... Much has been said about Afghan corruption, and with justification, but many were aggrieved when David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in the country, said that corruption had been part of Afghan culture for ‘however long this country has … been in existence’. Many Afghans dispute this, saying that corruption was manageable under the ...”

“... more on the reason Buckley chose him as his biographer, when not long before he had passed over David Frum and David Brooks as potential successors at National Review because they were Jewish (and perhaps even more unpardonably, Canadian). The reason seems to be that Buckley didn’t want a hagiography by one of his ...”

“... can be sure Heaney and Longley thought Olson no great thing. Even less expected is a postcard to David Hammond, a singer and TV director and one of Heaney’s closest friends, sent during a stay in California in 1976. The card apparently shows a muscular man h0lding a club and wearing a leopard-skin loincloth; the message ...”

“... school: some, sensing their difference, flaunted it. At my high school, an older boy insisted on wearing full makeup to class; and he was accepted in a patronising kind of way, his brazen otherness putting others at ease. They knew where they were with him; and he felt at least comfortable with their stable contempt. The rest of us who lived in a netherworld ...”

“... I get talking to Ahmed, one of the members of the organisation. Small and bespectacled, he is wearing a knitted cap, denim jacket and jeans. He suggests that we take a seat to one side of the hall. He wants to talk about the Ummah, the worldwide community of believers. Eventually I manage to ask him what he makes of the pair at the back of the ...”

“... on the same day as Bishop Hooper, who had been led through London by night and taken to Gloucester wearing a hood so that his sympathisers could not recognise him. There he was burned in a slow, botched execution, ‘for the example and terror’ of the townsfolk, in the place where, according to the Catholic queen, he had done most harm. The burnings were a ...”

“... abuses, let alone the Rabaa massacre or the mass imprisonment and torture of dissidents. When David Cameron held a meeting with Sisi in New York in September he spoke of ‘Egypt’s pivotal role in the region’ and its importance to British policy. ‘Both economically and in the fight against Islamist extremism’, he said, Egypt was a crucial ally and ...”

“... Yorke did this.’ Too great a responsibility. I decided against it. The meteorite necklace I was wearing when every Republican in the world got Covid-19 back in October was also judged a risk, since they had all recovered – either because God loves sinners, or because they had received special infusions of big-boy juice not available to the rest of ...”

“... arrives without cigarettes, rum or money, having gambled most of it away on the ship; he is wearing only a light suit and a pair of watchekongs to greet the ‘beast winter’. A white woman from Ladbroke Grove gives birth to Oliver’s child eight and a half months after his arrival (this is never mentioned again), and his maverick ways earn him the ...”

“... train, and opened the packet to discover a very old pale blue lady’s woolly, which he took to wearing in bed when he was ill.’ His childhood was blighted by parental neglect – a rapidly dawning consciousness of exclusion from Constant’s sophisticated world and a basic conviction of his own superfluousness. Photographs at all stages of his life show ...”

“... Perhaps some lonely tweedy, pipe-smoking schoolmaster, isolated in a common room overrun by jeans-wearing Sixty-Eighters. Or some embattled country clergyman, sandbagging the last ditch to stop the Church of England from becoming the Fourth International at prayer. But the book is not without its value. It tells us, in Covell’s words, why the ...”

“... opposition. An analogous example of this error occurred when the Sikhs were exempted from wearing helmets on motor-bikes. The first Race Relations Act (1965) missed the main areas where discrimination actually bit. It made the incitement to racial hatred unlawful and at the same time it made it unlawful to discriminate against people in places of ...”

“... on Brunel’s Great Western Railway. Studies of Faraday’s experimental sophistication (by David Gooding) and his Sandemanian faith (by Geoffrey Cantor) have deepened, rather than challenged, our sense of his eminence. James’s work, meanwhile – in his own publications and his DNB entry on Faraday – has highlighted Faraday’s importance as a ...”