“... frightens me but the idea of enforced idleness. As long as I can write books, even though they may not be published, I think that I can be happy.’ He had retired 13 years earlier from the responsible position of travelling Post Office surveyor which he had held during most of his wage-earning life. The only complaint he voiced about this and his other ...”

“... of the Sistine Ceiling, that Julius II’s ‘favourite theologian’ was a man whom the Pope may never have met, and whose work he may never have read? The bizarre combination of exceptional erudition and a complete lack of any acceptable historical method was one of the reasons he was such a compelling lecturer. The ...”

“... it seems to me a very savvy statement, at any rate for people who write. For a real writer, it may well be that writing and thought are indivisible, and that the only pure thinking writers do is when they are actually writing. This may be why, when not writing, I seem to be, if not in space, if not I hope spacey, at any ...”

“... relevance.) It is, truly, an amazing story. At the end of the 11th century a European army, which may originally have numbered no more than thirty-five thousand, and which was much reduced by battle, disease and defection, nevertheless contrived to take Jerusalem. Of the various Crusader states that they founded in ‘Outremer’, some lasted nearly two ...”

“... a long-hop.’ Denis Compton said: ‘He is a yobbo, who was never as good as he thinks.’ Peter May and his selectors refused even to pick Botham for England after the ban had expired. Was all this really because the game had been ‘brought into disrepute’ through Botham’s article on cannabis? Cannabis is illegal, but it is not dangerous, as far as ...”

“... was not always so visible. A character in Cicero invokes him thus: ‘Aristotle, whom I think I may with justice call the chief of all philosophers, with the exception of Plato’. Why so defensive? The implication is that even to rank Aristotle next after Plato is contentious, as if the thought was new and daring. Indeed it was. Aristotle died in 322 ...”

“... to 50 per cent’ in strategic weapons were contemptuously rejected. These anti-disarmament groups may well be prepared to engage in negotiations, but with the purpose of securing military benefits for their country. All those who think disarmament is desirable think it would be good if multilateral reductions could be negotiated, agreed, implemented and ...”

“... sold by the hundreds of thousand: today they seem naive, and sometimes comically romantic, and may well be virtually out of print. Marie Stopes had to face unremitting, often crude attacks. After the war we met regularly to discuss her sales, usually in some dark little-frequented restaurant where her persecutors would not track her down. I was incredulous ...”

“... to death for murder and again for piracy. He was hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping on Friday, 23 May 1701, and it is said that he was drunk at the time. Professor Ritchie’s account of Kidd’s last ten or twelve years is the result of an immense amount of reading: it goes deeply into the economic and cultural background of buccaneering and ...”

“... and unshakable savoir vivre, got up the noses of a good many matter-of-fact readers. We may note that Dalgliesh is now (A Taste for Death) afflicted with writer’s block: perhaps the two professions, the one involving practical, and the other metaphysical, elucidation, are incompatible after all. Dalgliesh last made an appearance in 1977, in Death ...”

“... there are now departments with no very junior people and no professors. The government may have set out to hack the ‘dead wood’ from the university system: what they have done instead is to slice off the living shoots and healthy branches. This was, of course, entirely predictable: established scholars will go where they are most valued and ...”

“... project’ and is not pressed for further details: ‘Project is a self-contained phrase and may or may not be capable of elaboration.’ TM muses: ‘I come across the word in newspapers and among academicians, engineers and adventurers. One might hear the word and keep quiet, no probing further.’ Rann might have ...”

“... but to pass the information on to some organisation unconnected with either of them: the leak may be a trap set for her husband, an Air Force officer. Ironically, it is the very fact that he is completely innocent of any connections with such organisations, that his only friends turn out to sympathise with the regime, which places Francisco in his ...”

“... are narrated in the third person, others by one or another of the characters – a technique which may at first seem unnecessarily elaborate or insufficiently exploited, but in time comes to seem right, a gesture of respect for even small differences in perception. Miss Erdrich is as shrewd about complex long-term human bonds in The Beet Queen as she was in ...”

“... important point, however, she suggests rather than exhausts the Tahitian side of the story, and may not do justice to the implications of the new globalisation of commodities, of which the breadfruit mission was a part. The 18th-century romanticisation of Polynesia as another Eden, all luscious fruit and naked Eves, was not just an abstraction, but also a ...”