“... are well known to readers of his previous books, most relevantly The Surgeon of Crowthorne, and little with the former, which hardly needs my twopenn’orth of praise and whose faults, as revealed over the years, are being addressed in a new edition. The book begins with a prologue describing the magnificently self-congratulatory dinner held to celebrate ...”

“... a spirit lamp’; she ‘filled the silver teapot and received her daughter’s kiss, emanating a little draught of violets’. The Duchy and Rachel are elevated into a saintly ordinariness. They are a mostly vanished English middle-class type: girlish into old age, unsexual (the Duchy sleeps alone because the Brig snores, and Rachel’s yielding to Sid feels ...”

“... home in the Lake District, he had finished the autobiography: an outspoken, sometimes boastful little volume, which ended with an unguarded attack on some of the Oxford philosophers ‘of my youth’ as ‘propagandists of a coming Fascism’. The University Press had to overcome a few qualms, and insisted on some revisions, before publishing it the ...”

“... were at least serious about literature. Too much so, one might claim. The surreal figure of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who in the early years of the Cambridge English Faculty would greet a lecture audience composed largely of women with the word ‘Gentlemen!’, is partly excused for his belletristic waffling on the grounds that he was modestly ...”

“... The big puzzle about anthrax is that terrorists have so far used it so little. After all, the bulk of the world’s population lives in countries where it occurs naturally, and where it isn’t difficult to get live material to start a culture. The notion that you need to be trained in biological warfare to grow it is ludicrous ...”

“... Had they been, the Party would indeed have been unique. Perhaps the best essay in the book is on Arthur Balfour and the controversy over tariff reform in the first decade of the 20th century, when Britain had lost what the economist Alfred Marshall called its ‘industrial leadership’, and when the Conservative Party came nearer Green’s vision of it ...”

“... for Walpole, the profiteering manipulator of a stage-play world. If Fielding’s early biographer Arthur Murphy is to be believed, there was little exaggeration here. ‘When he had contracted to bring on a play,’ Murphy stiffly reports, ‘he would go home rather late from a tavern, and would, the next morning, deliver a ...”

“... manuscript’, was discovered in the archives of Hereford Cathedral in 1907. The next year Arthur Thomas Bannister became a canon there. His appointment had been somewhat controversial: a man ‘of singular simplicity and directness’, he was known for his liberal sympathies and a tendency to blurt out information about church assets. But he slowly ...”

“... that many of the same things are now being said about His Royal Highness Prince Charles Philip Arthur George. For while, in some ways, the British monarchy is constantly developing and evolving, in other respects it is remarkably consistent and unchanging, and one of its most unvarying features during the last three hundred years has been the miserable lot ...”

“... later tell Elizabeth Gaskell that Southey’s letter had been ‘kind and admirable’, if ‘a little stringent’, to the writer himself she returned an answer in which genuine humility and self-abasement can barely be distinguished from an edgy and corrosive irony:   In the evenings, I confess, I do think, but I never trouble any one else with my ...”

“... photographs show is a dark, strikingly semitic girl holding the palest, blondest, most angelic of little boys. Erikson has been blamed for ignoring his Jewish background, but for him to assume that he had one gentile parent was not unreasonable. If Karla Abrahamsen had been, as Erik’s half-sisters later suspected, virtually raped by an unknown, it would ...”

“... a great part of the population of Normandy marks itself off from the Parisian riff-raff by putting little longship stickers on their cars. The longships are called drakkars – for reasons no one seems to know, any more than they know where the wildly impractical horned helmet idea comes from – a word which has only some resemblance to genuine Old Norse ...”

“... or that English version captures or even surpasses the original, one might suppose that there is little point in reading a foreign novel in the original language. Yet some literary styles remain elusive in translation. The characters in Elsa Morante’s masterpiece, Arturo’s Island, are bewitched and bewitching, in thrall to someone, or to some ...”

“... As for mistakes, it is surprising that the King James apparently has so few. Alter corrects very little, sometimes unconvincingly, though he is more specific on flora and fauna. His de-Christianisation is largely in the avoidance of frequent King James terms such as ‘salvation’, ‘soul’, ‘mercy’, ‘sin’ and its sister, ‘iniquity’. He ...”

“... considered a shame that she hadn’t tried writing something less rebarbative. Her younger brother Arthur ‘often lamented’, the 1804 editor of the Essay recalled, ‘that a sister possessing such amiable manners, and such abilities, should only be known to the literary world by a satirical work’. It would take another hundred years at least for it to ...”