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“... 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 ...”

“... moral simplicities prove ambiguous or uncertain. The two heraldic supporters of Gertrude are first Peter, known as the Count, a Polish refugee, friend and former colleague of Guy; and Anne, college friend of Gertrude, recently emerged from 14 years in a convent. The Count is the only possible candidate for the ‘soldier’ of the title, and he becomes so only ...”

“... bought by the family ‘just in case’ – they usually have no idea how to send a text. So Peter Mandelson wasn’t referring to them when he went on TV in May to press for the part-privatisation of the Royal Mail, saying that figures were down due to competition from emails and texts.I spluttered into my tea when I heard him say that. ‘Figures are ...”

“... May 1982, even if their owner Rupert Murdoch so wished – which he emphatically doesn’t. Peter Riddell of the Financial Times has taken an educated interest, but he is also in the House of Commons Lobby, and you cannot expect Lobby journalists to allow themselves to be perceived as part of a campaign. Paul Foot of the Mirror writes as pungently as ...”

“... Before​ I embarked on Eley Williams, of whom I had read nothing and knew nothing, I flipped through Attrib., her first book of stories. Even on first flip, I got a sense of something I sometimes find in things I like and that seem good to me, something that subliminally distinguishes writing that is careful and alive: a kind of alphabetical justice, to give this sheepish and probably disreputable thing a name in public ...”

“... from his Utopia. Even so, it had been Erasmus who had given him letters to friends such as Peter Giles, dedicatee of Utopia, in Antwerp and it was Erasmus who saw to the publication of Lucian, the epigrams and Utopia, bustling about to secure commendatory letters and so enhance them. Erasmus also coined and disseminated the description ‘a man for all ...”