“... Archipelago was published in the West in the mid-1970s, Soviet Communism had already lost what little intellectual cachet it had left in Europe. Both Russian and American culture were warped and disfigured by the contest, however: one side by continuing Stalinist paranoia and a resumption of the purges and cultural repression that had eased during the war ...”

“... On a cycling holiday in Scotland A.C. Benson went to meet Arthur Balfour at Whittingehame. The prime minister was out practising on his private golf course. They saw him ‘approaching across the grass, swinging a golf club – in rough coat and waistcoat, the latter open; a cloth cap, flannel trousers; and large black boots, much too heavy and big for his willowy figure ...”

“... pages written at the statutory 250 words every quarter of an hour. Trollope seems to have relied little on written memoranda to aid composition, believing as he did that it is ‘harder to think of a novel than to write it’. Having thought through his narrative, what followed was relatively plain sailing. By contrast, Charles Reade was the most ...”

“... the judicial ark, a role which hardly seems to square with his breezy, sanguine public figure, so little suggestive of an axe-grinding zealot. But readers seeking the answer to this puzzle will find themselves scarcely the wiser. It was little or nothing to do, apparently, with the fact that his father, a naval ...”

“... groups at which women friends swapped complaints about men behaving badly in toilets, and little better in kitchens. She likes her men to be ‘dishcloth-literate’, a state of grace to which few attain. She is familiar with the sort of household in which the wife washes only her own dishes, leaving her husband to wash his, when the fancy takes ...”

“... colleague Tommaso Caccini, and the Florentine philosopher Lodovico delle Colombe. According to Arthur Koestler, however, Galileo was the victim of his own fatal flaws: ‘vanity, jealousy and self-righteousness combined into a demoniac force which drove him to the brink of self-destruction’. According to Stillman Drake, who has devoted a lifetime of ...”

“... another chapter in the “God-that-failed” saga’. That, I think, is unfair. Unlike Arthur Koestler, Camus was not performing a public autocritique of his past as a Communist, but trying to put utopian politics in its place. ‘Politics,’ he insisted, ‘is not a religion; if it becomes one it becomes an inquisition.’ Only those who believe ...”

“... out of date. But this has yet to be demonstrated, for the old whale is quite content to absorb a little Marxism or a little Thatcherism into his giant belly. So long as Whiggery – or social democracy, as we now call it – remains the working language of British politics, it will also remain the most viable language for ...”

“... iconoclasts have done, is to signal an intention to debunk it even before the first snickery little anecdote has been laid on the page. But it is not quite so ill-founded as the blatant hypocrisy and frantic status-seeking gleefully recorded by Professor Fussell and his precursors may make it appear. For it rests on an underlying assumption that ...”

“... Webbs’ variety and that imperialist collectivism represented by Joseph Chamberlain. Yet he had little viable or credible to offer as an alternative – at most, a vague romanticism about ‘feudalism’, as supposedly incarnated in the English country gentleman, and an equally vague notion (perhaps this came a ...”

“... like his friend Ryan, whose wife is ‘perpetually giving birth, the children flying out like little bats from under her dress’. But when he finally works up the courage to buy a place of his own, the foundation collapses almost immediately – ‘cancer of the house’, he says. Then there are the free spirits, equally impressive. Hired by Roland Joffe ...”

“... is not a seducer at all, but a thoroughly likeable senior railway engineer who has little idea how important his visit has been for Cousin Phillis. He sees her as a Sleeping Beauty, quite unaware, and promises himself with some complacency that he will come back from Canada, where he is bound on a new railway assignment, ‘and waken her to my ...”

“... didn’t see the real Los Angeles until 1965. But to him the city was a myth as powerful as King Arthur. ‘I rented a car at the airport and drove down the length of Sunset in time to see the sun sink into the Pacific … I spent my time driving aimlessly around the freeways. It was concrete over sand. The anguish of lost souls … The people had lost their ...”

“... unique among well-studied objects, though a similar visitor appears in Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (asteroid 4923), which imagines an apparently abandoned cylindrical spacecraft entering the solar system. In Clarke’s novel, plucky astronauts make a close-up inspection of Rama and confirm its artificial nature, though its origin and the ...”

“... novel, all the good Christians on a 747 to London are suddenly transported to Heaven, leaving little piles of clothes and uneaten lasagna behind them. The same happens all over the planet. Call it the Rapture or the Rip-Off: Stephen King had done the disappearing passenger thing in ‘The Langoliers’ in 1990. But why should the devil have all the good ...”