“... seems to be in the same boat. So how much paranoia should we have? A modest answer would be: as little as we can manage, whatever amount allows us to make sense of the world – individual thresholds would of course be different, like thresholds of pain. Another answer would involve exploring paranoia itself as a symptom, which is what Don DeLillo does in ...”

“... of other enlightened travellers, including William Marsden’s History of Sumatra (1783) and Arthur Young’s studies of French agriculture (1787-89), were intended as major contributions to knowledge. Marsden’s work was inspired by his regular attendance at the Royal Society’s ‘philosophical breakfasts’ in Soho Square.There were equally ...”

“... me to treat fiction-as-art as a happy accident rather than a desideratum. And if there is too little fiction-as-art for fiction-addicted adults, how much less for children! Tot up all the children’s novels commended by Bratton, Inglis and Tucker, divide them by the ones available to a child at any particular stage of its development, and there will be ...”

“... cartoons, he published (or rather, mostly republished) work by John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first serialised in the magazine. ‘I only read it for the articles,’ joked subscribers, of which ...”

“... might be performed. In this process of spiritual colonisation, the Catholic clergy showed little compunction about taking over former pagan sanctuaries and appropriating their numinous aura. As Pope Gregory the Great remarked in his instructions of 601 for the Christian conversion of England, people were more likely to worship in places with which ...”

“... knew he had a squeaky voice, but several other on-field heroes – A.E. Stoddart, William Scotton, Arthur Shrewsbury – killed themselves after their careers ended, unable to cope with the loss of fame and/or money. Audiences demanded swagger in music too, forcing that poor ambitious provincial Edward Elgar to respond with ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. It was ...”

“... Riding’s fast-paced account sticks roughly with Poole and Bend’s interpretations, but puts a little more emphasis on the home secretary’s desire to crush the popular movement. She agrees that Peterloo was a massacre. Conservative interpretations have previously indulged in some pedantry about this because the number of deaths did not reach the ...”

“... of description and stolen lines of song. In ‘When it’s time to go’, she quotes ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’: ‘O great classic cadences of English poetry/We blush to hear thee lie/Above thy deep and dreamless.’ (Here the word ‘lie’ is given its double entendre.) One poem is called ‘A Misremembered Lyric’. There’s also ...”

“... III knew that it wasn’t enough to host a round table linking his reign with the legend of King Arthur, as he did at Windsor in 1358. For maximum effect, he also sent heralds to announce the event abroad. Medieval public relations had to be managed just as carefully as their modern equivalents. Edward II tried to curtail minstrel activity, possibly to quash ...”

“... through their rubbish. At the end of the 19th century, two Oxford academics, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, set off for the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus in search of Greek texts written on papyrus. Over six seasons, assisted by scores of local workmen, they excavated thousands of papyri from the city’s rubbish mounds and transported them to ...”

“... slipstream, craving his attention and his praise; they were all highly intelligent, with little formal education; and they all had a taste for (to borrow the title of Diana Holderness’s recent memoir) ‘the Ritz and the Ditch’ – in other words, for the high life and the low life. They’d be dining at the Ritz (usually at someone else’s ...”

“... not a single example of Buñuel or Rossellini or of Cocteau or Fritz Lang or von Sternberg or Arthur Penn or Pasolini or Warhol or Woody Allen, nor a film directed or choreographed by Busby Berkeley, nor, amazingly, a film starring either Garbo or Fred Astaire, nor Shoah. Instead, it finds room for The Quiet Man and The Bridge on the River Kwai, three ...”

“... earth’s jealousy and defeat of her daughters where her sons are concerned – would give it a little wit. As things are, the repetition of ‘sons’ is tense against ‘my friend’, the moving simplicity of which stands in sharp contrast to the conceit of the first two lines. There are real tears in the verse, and they are not, in the words of Auden’s ...”

“... scholar, best-known for an ambitious and highly controversial interpretation of the Age of Arthur. Londinium has been published posthumously, like Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne; unlike Pirenne’s work, it has been carefully revised and updated (by Sarah Macready). It is, remarkably, the first full-length historical treatment that Roman London ...”

“... Eliminate this privacy, and we are in the totalitarian world represented by Mao’s Little Red Book where ‘reading’ is on the agenda of the mass political rally. What happens between the Western reader and his book will always be intriguing. But short of some bibliometric equivalent to Masters and Johnson, it’s hard to see how the ...”