“... is the relationship of the frames to architectural motifs and to other types of furniture. Peter Thornton’s The Italian Renaissance Interior is a long, erudite and entertaining investigation of such matters as how rooms were lit and heated, how ceilings were constructed and decorated, where carpets came from and how they were displayed. It is chiefly ...”

“... Camp sensibility. It would be 1964 before Susan Sontag emerged with her ‘Notes on Camp’, which read nowadays, in their arch solemnity, like some kind of ambush on the tendency itself, and which must be among the least effectively stylised pronouncements on the virtues of American stylisation. However, I’d sooner, by a thousand times, have Sontag’s ...”

“... to sleep each night. Over the next three decades he became the survivor who wrote the most but was read the least, producing more than thirty books of history (The Administered Man, a study of the deportations of German Jewry), sociology (The Experience of Powerlessness, a study of camp organisation), poetry and fiction, all published on a shoestring in West ...”

“... there was only one child, a girl. This was a mistake: she was supposed to have been a boy called Peter, and although she was baptised Gerda Erika Maria, her father never called her anything but Peter. Appearances mattered to the young Rösels. My mother has told me that my grandmother went hungry so that she could afford ...”

“... Mr Justice Cantley, whose outrageously biased speech (in favour of the defence) was satirised by Peter Cook in the character of Justice Cocklecarrot. In the 1980s, Carman took on a series of high-profile criminal cases. He successfully defended Dr Leonard Arthur, who had been charged with murder when he deliberately left a Down’s syndrome child to starve ...”

“... who writes rather thoughtful spy stories told me it was the best book about espionage he had ever read. It is a history of the CIA through the life of Richard Helms, who was director from 1966 to 1973. Much of Powers’s information comes from the spies themselves, and while it is a great achievement to persuade such men to speak, they are masters of what ...”

“... of refuge and fantasy’. It is one of those destinations – ‘like the South of France before Peter Mayle, and Tuscany before champagne socialists’ – which, it is assumed, is ‘unspoilt by the American coffee shops and the malls and the ring roads that have ruined Arnoldian England’. But as Sansom discovers, the Ireland of middle-class English ...”

“... graduate this summer; others will ‘graduate’ without their assessments being marked, or even read – including capstone assessments such as dissertations. If marks don’t matter, what is an examination system for? What does a degree mean? At the University of Edinburgh, where I teach, changes pushed through the Senate will allow students to get ...”

“... and ideas, together with a detailed and informative textual apparatus and notes. Everyone who has read Tolstoy’s life knows that the germ of Anna Karenina was a fragment of Pushkin’s that begins, ‘The guests were arriving at the dacha,’ and Tolstoy’s enthusiastic comment that this was just how a novel should open. Now that they can ...”

“... in Alexandria, and even his most enthusiastic supporters concede that Apollonius was never easy to read. Sometimes you find yourself watching him unpick the best he has achieved. A famous simile compares Medea’s flickering passion for Jason to the light ‘glancing off the surface of just-poured water in a sunlit cauldron, or alternatively’, Apollonius ...”

“... and small print and, though provided with new introductions in 1994 and supplementary essays by Peter Ackroyd and Germaine Greer thereafter, is still based on a text prepared by Peter Alexander in 1951. It is surely not a coincidence that the RSC is the same price as the hardbacks of the revised Oxford and the Complete ...”

“... Ernest Gellner, who offers an exemplary exposition of Julien Benda’s much mentioned but little read La Trahison des Clercs of 1928. Benda called intellectuals to task for deserting old standards of truth, objectivity and morality. But as Gellner sees it, it was because 19th and 20th-century intellectuals have been ‘so loyal to the old transcendent ...”

“... at any time since the 14th century. But the voice is that of a contemporary of ours, a man who has read Lacan and Groddeck, thinks of film, photographs and videos, and finds a connection between the Jews arguing in the Temple in the first century and the current ethnic policies of the state of Israel (‘Then tell me, do you believe that if we were one day to ...”

“... that produced such dire results in 19th- and 20th-century Europe, as Buruma and, especially, Peter Dale, author of The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness, have done? Or should we take it all with a pinch of salt? The position of those who take up an adversarial stance and invoke the direst of scenarios is fraught with difficulties. The Japanese can always ...”

“... bas-tards!). A big man who can move like lightning; a pathologically aggrieved pub lout who’s read some books; a ‘cheeky monkey’ from the Kop. Sayle’s posture is manically contemptuous, his rhythm a hysterical crescendo of obscenity with spat-out satirical asides. Both the stance and the timing are near-perfect, and within seconds he has the ...”