“... indeed almost to a pre-telephonic era. Eliot would occasionally encourage a correspondent to ring him at Faber and Faber’s offices to arrange or confirm some meeting, but there is very little sense here that the main business of communication has been carried on off the page by phone. Even though Eliot spent much of the war years as a guest in other ...”

“... all had it coming first by a mile.And it all gets stranger. Next month, The Fellowship of the Ring, the first in a three-part movie adaptation of Tolkien’s masterwork, will have a worldwide release. Unlike the last attempt, Ralph Bakshi’s peculiar semi-animated version of 1978, this new production is a proper live-action global-Hollywood movie, with ...”

“... has,”’ and in general doing whatever it took to persuade Americans that a diamond engagement ring was ‘a psychological necessity’.As everyone knows, it worked. Before the Second World War, something like 20 per cent of engagement rings had a diamond in them; by the end of the century, it was closer to 80 per cent. In 1978, apparently high on its ...”

“... in expenditure and, if there are to be any, in taxation. We have heard more about what is to be ‘ring-fenced’ – health, defence, perhaps education, almost certainly law and order – than what is to go, and more about taxes that won’t be cut than those that will.Given what the Conservatives did between 1979 and 1997 we tend to assume that taking an axe ...”

“... have in mind is either to ‘contain’ China by overwhelming military force and the creation of a ring of American allies; or, in the case of the real radicals, to destroy the Chinese Communist state as the Soviet Union was destroyed. As with the Soviet Union, this would presumably involve breaking up China by ‘liberating’ Tibet and other areas, and under ...”

“... damaging their independence. In the wider world, our present agenda has an even more Gladstonian ring: the defence of human rights, the protection of small, faraway oppressed nations, the defeat of piracy and terrorism, the restoration of the European balance. Is there a single theme that Blair has articulated which Gladstone did not articulate before ...”

“... analysis of works she admired: ‘What more are you going to say of a great thing [in this case, Ring Lardner’s collected stories] than that it is great?’ Instead, she preferred what Sloane Crosley calls the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of Elinor Glyn, Emily Post and Winnie the Pooh, at whose insistent whimsy ‘Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up’. The main draw was ...”

“... becomes separated from her little girl; the mother gets out, but the child does not. I think of Christian. I know I would rather not live than survive him. By lunch I have written three pages – Arnold Bennett’s thousand words. Strange how a story weaves its own pattern within the guidance of your loom. At the bookshop another excellent day of ...”

“... circling the murder scene and terrorising them with his loaded lettering. A group of white-suited Christian vigilantes begin to take matters into their own hands and patrol the place with baseball bats, drumming up moral fury. Perry avoids them and concentrates on following the alphabet. He sees signs that others don’t: it’s as if he has a special ...”

“... relationships with other agents. He also had some useful political friends, especially in the Christian Democrat Party (which governed Italy from 1948 to 1992), and was close to many sports journalists. In 1994 Moggi became the sporting director of Juventus (the most powerful position in Italian club football after the president), working alongside the ...”

“... than Christianity, but that was before I reached my room and switched on the television, where the Christian Channel appeared to be playing round the clock from America. ‘Every penny will go to send the Gospel out,’ said an elderly white man trapped in hairspray and gold rings. ‘I’m gonna ask you to join with me to send the Gospel out. And if God opens ...”

“... with you, the more telling the picture. Framed by a window a view takes on a new character. Johan Christian Dahl’s View of Pillnitz Castle, in which the window is merely a border round the distant landscape, or Karl Gottfried Travgott Faber’s view of Dresden, in which the window itself and slim strips of wall are all you are given, are utterly changed if ...”

“... as highly as the Roman heroine who killed herself after being raped by Tarquin (although as a Christian the remedy of suicide would not be available). The woman wears a wedding ring and has long been supposed, reasonably enough, to depict a wealthy Venetian named Lucrezia. But while a high premium was placed on chastity ...”

“... is set within a shopping mall, Grand Central, which blurs into another shopping mall, the Bull Ring. Richard Vinen, writing the first serious history of Birmingham in a long while, is aware of how hard it is to pin the city down, to explain what it is or what it is for. Planners in the 1960s, he says, ‘were sometimes perplexed as to why Birmingham had ...”

“... but is hardly English. They turn Middle-Eastern Phalanges chrétiennes (Falangists) into ‘Christian phalanxes’. On two successive pages, they veer between C and K as the initial letter of ‘Karamanlis’. Heads of State deserve more careful treatment. Even so, truncated and traduced, something of François Mitterrand emerges from The Wheat and the ...”