“... correctness gone mad’. (Criticism didn’t come only from the Right: see, for example, John Upton’s piece in the LRB, 1 July 1999.) The accusations Johnson had in mind might include an article about Macpherson by a certain Boris Johnson that appeared in the Guardian last February – in which the author wondered how ‘this sober old ...”

“... security services are on the look out for terrorists, not journalists. All the same, ‘furious’ John Reid, the defence secretary, has ordered an investigation. Let’s assume for a moment that the male line of the monarchy is under threat. How to safeguard it? Perhaps a royal sperm bank is in order. There used to be one for the seed of Nobel Prize ...”

“... digitally rejigged versions were released in the late 1990s: in the merchandising of Star Wars, John Seabrook writes in NoBrow (2000), ‘dreams were being spun into desire, and desire into product.’ And then one day I got tired of it all and gave my toys away to a younger boy who lived down the road. A Galaxy Not So Far Away opens with a brilliant and ...”

“... than Poirot’s. If you find this kind of thing fun, you’re probably already familiar with John Sutherland’s Was Heathcliff a Murderer?, Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? and Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? but you might be interested to know they’ve been collected in an omnibus edition with a new introduction, under the title The Literary Detective ...”

“... are, well, at play in Scouting for Boys: playing at being soldiers; putting on plays (the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, for example); and, of course, playing up, playing up and playing the game. During the siege of Mafeking, the Boer commander, General Snyman, invited the British to a game of cricket. Baden-Powell replied that first he had to finish the ...”

“... like the dreadful Vodi, despoilers of life, who work for Nelly, the witch with pointed teeth, in John Braine’s best novel, The Vodi, which appeared in 1959. Such demonic fantasies are quite common, I think, when young men are locked in a long-running conversation in, say, barrack-rooms or hospital wards. In Pinter’s case, the fantasy of ‘the ...”

“... last thirty years is to compare the introductions to the first and most recent editions of Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward’s Guide to the Architecture of London. In 1983, they wrote of a city in decline, its population down by about a sixth from its postwar height. ‘London is cleaner and uglier than it was at the beginning of the century; but it is ...”

“... Sir William Jones, the Enlightenment polymath who established the shared origins of Indo-European languages and cultures, certainly didn’t lack a capacity for big vision. But he was also keen on details, with no time for broad-brush talk about the seven ages of man. He was 47 – still in Jaques’s fifth age (‘And then the justice … with eyes severe’) – when he died in 1794, in the fancy Calcutta suburb of Garden Reach ...”

“... John Betjeman was nicely eccentric, and droll in a way mysteriously suited to English taste. His being so droll allowed him to display an out-of-the-way learning that might otherwise have seemed remote and ineffectual, but on which it was his gift to confer a certain centrality. He liked to seem lazy, which is why, having repeatedly failed the easy examination in Divinity then compulsory at Oxford, he went down without a degree ...”

“... When Put out More Flags was published in March 1942, Alan Pryce-Jones reviewed it in the New Statesman, praising the writer’s ‘dead-accurate’ social sense and his vituperative use of ‘the unpopular weapons of economy and proportion’, and yet concluding that the book and its author were ‘fundamentally without humour ...”

“... Isaacs), to the guest-house in Rhyl where Hanratty said he’d stayed. The landlady, Mrs Grace Jones, was not at all diverted by the pulverising she’d got from the prosecution at the trial. She was more sure than ever that Hanratty had stayed in her house on the night of the murder, 22 August 1961. She was backed up by Terry Evans, whom Hanratty had met ...”

“... two men, or rather this boy and this man, Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and Jack Levy, are at the centre of John Updike’s new novel. There can’t be many readers who will begin Terrorist without wondering what Updike – white, Protestant, 74 – thinks he is doing, presuming to be able to inhabit the consciousness of a teenage Arab-American Muslim. Michiko ...”

“... among the English middle classes, the early 20th century was a more genteel time than the 1750s. John Somerville, a youngish English archaeologist, digging in Mesopotamia in the spring of 1914, thinks he may have discovered evidence that would definitively resolve a number of uncertainties in the history of the late Assyrian Empire. Since those uncertainties ...”

“... bias towards quickness. Koch, in his poem ‘A Time Zone’, talks about his collaborations with John Ashbery on some more or less light-hearted – and certainly light – verse. These collaborations, which again put us in mind of Auden, feature the following (unpunctuated) lines: ‘He is not writing much this year but he likes to collaborate/So do I we do ...”

“... month been reissued in English (Faber, £6.99), has a new rival. And I don’t mean Toby Litt, the John Calvin of the New Puritans, though the name of Jonson’s Zeal-of-the-land Busy also comes to mind, what with Litt’s latest 400-pager, deadkidsongs (Hamish Hamilton, £9.99) hitting the bookshops today, a mere 12 months after Corpsing came out. Litt, who ...”