“... whether everyone in England understands the extent to which the result in Scotland was determined by the immediate prospect of the community charge, or as it is now known even in the most fastidious financial circles, the ‘poll tax’. It is one thing to have sentences about a rather obscure ‘community charge’ buried in the Manifesto. It is quite ...”

“... David Selbourne’s The Principle of Duty is described on the dust-jacket as ‘the most comprehensive theory of civic society written in English since Locke’. ‘In English’ is wise: it excludes Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Hegel, Marx and Weber. The claim remains bizarre: Locke did not produce a theory of civil society, comprehensive or otherwise, but an account of our obligations to government or the state ...”

“... and seniors at Oxford. He made friends with men and women who were to become, or beginning to be, what the Germans call prominente. Among them were Richard Crossman, A.L. Rowse, Maurice Bowra, Isaiah Berlin, David Astor and the journalist Shiela Grant Duff, who, in 1982, published a book about their relationship, and ...”

“... From the outset, ambiguity enfolds The Plum in the Golden Vase, David Tod Roy’s translation of the first volume of the monumental 16th-century Chinese novel Chin P’ing Mei. The title, as he explains in his Introduction, is a ‘multiple pun’ composed of one ideogram each from the names of the three principal female protagonists ...”

“... Virgin and Child with angels: the Chellini roundel from the museum’s own collection and one lent by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In the first, the drapery has countless small, wriggling folds resembling a heap of tangled string. In the second, the folds flow gracefully and clarify form; an angel’s tunic is gently lifted ...”

“... builders of Chernobyl? For the Kariba North Bank power station, however, there is now a memorial-David Morrell’s Indictment. Mr Morrell is the chairman of Mitchell Construction, the original contractors for the KNB project, and his book breaks ground unturned since Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers. In his pages, Mitchell Construction, in legal ...”

“... of fascinating studies, ranging from Babylon to 20th-century Ghana, from China to Madagascar. David Cannadine, in his Introduction, says that the topics covered are mainly pre-modern and therefore outside the scope of most professional historians. In their Acknowledgments, however, the two editors refer to the ‘rites of passage’ of contemporary heads ...”

“... Procedures Manual’, an attempt to codify both Hughes’s memoranda and the instructions set down by his compliant lieutenants. Its guidelines for employees, generously quoted in Barlett and Steele’s 1979 biography of Hughes, are extremely precise. They range from general conduct (‘Do not fraternise with persons outside the office ... Tell your wife as ...”

“... argued that ‘Israel’s stance towards the democratically-elected Palestinian government headed by Hamas in 2006, and towards Palestinian national coherence – legal, territorial, political and economic – has been a major obstacle to substantive peacemaking.’ Whatever their reservations about the organisation, the authors of the paper detected signs ...”

“... Jonathan Meades​ is the Jonathan Meades of our generation,’ reads a puff-quote by the late A.A. Gill on the cover of Meades’s new cookbook, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen (Unbound, £20), but it’s hard to think of any patch less in need of a Jonathan Meades than English food writing. Perhaps this wasn’t the case when Meades was writing his restaurant column for the Times in the 1980s and 1990s, when food culture deserved the inventively digressive broadsides he continues to direct at English blindspots – modernist architecture, provincial glamour, France – in his excellent television programmes ...”

“... Some things​ in the relations between authors and publishers never change. Dear Mr Murray, edited by David McClay (John Murray, £16.99), a collection of letters written to six generations of the Murray family, is full of familiar complaints. Jane Austen was ‘very much disappointed … by the delays of the printers ...”

“... and entertaining contributions. Hugh Trevor-Roper discusses the origins of Scottish kitsch; David Cannadine the (not at all remote) origins of British royal ritual; other contributions concern British rule in India and Welsh cultural identity (treated more respectfully than Trevor-Roper treats poor old Scotland). Eric Hobsbawm both introduces and ...”

“... one-sentence paragraph: ‘1. The woman is the first to give him trouble, followed soon afterwards by the man.’ We might suppose ‘him’ to be the story’s main character, but the second paragraph makes clear that he is in fact the writer, who is inviting us to share in his creative process, to track the movements of ...”

“... few thousand dollars for a small vial, different versions of this indispensable elixir are hawked by laboratory supply companies the world over. Many of these products’ consumers have long been aware that there is a human story behind HeLa’s blandly commercialised ubiquity; now Rebecca Skloot’s remarkable book has appeared to fill in all the ...”

“... themselves and the purpose of their journey, but we suspect them of lying. They are an odd set, by the standards of both 1736 and 1985. The leader of the party calls himself Mr Bartholomew, but later in the story we shall find him described as ‘his Lordship’. In his room at the inn, this young man fills his glass from a blue-and-white decanter of ...”