“... alter interior space, and house and garden are connected across verandahs or through windows which may frame precise views. Not all Japanese gardens are meant to be entered; some are intended only to be viewed from a particular room, often from a seated or kneeling position.This habit of seeing only what you are meant to see and from the right angle is useful ...”

“... the Anatolian coast. It was the site of a huge sanctuary of Asclepius, the god of medicine, which may also have been a medical school. Galen probably trained there. His father, Nicon, was an architect, who wrote several treatises on buildings and ensured his son was schooled in maths and philosophy. Galen’s first medical position in Pergamon was as ...”

“... not much liking the human race and deducing from the circumstances of his arrival that they may all be mad. Annoyingly, he cannot remember the details of his pre-human existence; nor can he escape his prison of humanity. At the moment of death, he is sitting on a park bench, and performs his metempsychosis trick on a nearby management consultant. But ...”

“... it’s at the cost of abandoning all responsibility, as she runs towards a helicopter that may contain anyone: Americans? Frelimo? Cubans? ‘Saviours or murderers’, it no longer matters: ‘She runs: trusting herself with all the suppressed trust of a lifetime, alert, like a solitary animal at the season when animals neither seek a mate nor take ...”

“... and totality of physical love, and the difference between this and whatever other arrangements may have to be made. Mrs Weldon’s celebration of this discovery is not only fervent: it is worshipful. The spiky ladies who populated her earlier novels now fade into the background, while the foreground is dominated by a woman and her lover, and what passes ...”

“... and, above all, far too many Greeks.’ ‘Good, well, I understand you, bey effendi, you may trust both my son and me.’ It was arranged that Alecco should work and sleep at the doctor’s house in Hayreddin Pasha Street. His room was not much larger than a cupboard, but then, neither had it been at home. Loneliness was his trouble, not ...”

“... some of its peculiar characteristics – in particular, the vast and disconcerting erudition which may be off-putting to British readers. He is concerned with an area corresponding to the département of the Var, east of Marseilles, around Toulon and on what is now the Côte d’Azur, within a chronological framework which takes in the first half of the 19th ...”

“... strings and their memories of her, live there in cordial mutual hatred: deaf April, mutilated May, retarded June, and brother Jasper, whose ruling passions are cooking (in a filthy kitchen) and spiting his sisters. It is the same world as that of Molly Keane’s last novel Good Behaviour (a brilliant come-back after 26 years’ silence), a world of ...”

“... At first glance Fire-Power may seem to be a professional study by gunners about gunners and for gunners, but if readers not privileged to have served in the Royal Regiment can absorb the technical information and diagrams they will learn a lot about the realities of warfare in the first half of the 20th century. In particular, they will appreciate the extent to which fire-power has dominated combat and what techniques have been evolved to exploit it and overcome it ...”

“... personal physician, we know that he will not be adequate in any way to meet the surprises that may lie ahead. There is a vacancy in him, a hollow that we know will be filled up by the overflowing charisma of what he calls ‘the number one id’. Garrigan’s new master is six foot six inches tall and weighs 20 stone. He is in the rudest of health. There ...”

“... this part of the story. We do not find Abelard inventing a doctrine called nominalism, as Sartre may have invented Existentialism or Barthes or somebody Structuralism. William of Ockham did this two centuries later, but not Abelard. He seems to have drawn the crowds by a witty and unpious mode and a talent for bon mots. We do find him making his way by a ...”

“... been consigned to quicklime in the prison yard, could be buried in consecrated ground. ‘There may be trouble there,’ the news editor beamed. ‘This chap Alphon may cause a fuss.’ I had no idea who Alphon was, and after the burial in Wembley, I was none the wiser. There was nothing to report, so I gladly accepted ...”

“... spiss – oh! Yet, most spissantly ...Or:The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,If one may say so ...Or:One’s tootings at the weddings of the soulOccur as they occur.An evening is said to ‘skreak and skritter’; ‘chu-chot-chu’ is the sound of the laughter of evil. ‘Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk’ is how Stevens in ‘A ...”

“... died instead. The disabilities and illnesses which afflicted Arnold in childhood and early manhood may also have played an important part. Hamilton makes much more than previous biographers have done of the ‘irons’, or leg braces, that the infant wore between the ages of two and four, and which led to his unlovely family nickname, ‘Crabby’ (from his ...”

“... that ‘evil intent’ should be strictly irrelevant to the definition and punishment of crime may have gained a hold in criminological circles, but there are few signs of its acceptance among the people at large (and its creeping penetration into sentencing procedures may well have helped to deepen widespread popular ...”