“... in any other. (I’ve been told that senses are sometimes given to concepts at Oxford after the gates close to visitors; but that may be a leg-pull.) Nor am I clear what you’re supposed to do with a notion once a sense has been given it. There used to be a story according to which empirical inquiry works by first giving senses to notions, and then ...”

“... York Times critic Anatole Broyard, who died in 1990, was unmasked in the New Yorker by Henry Louis Gates. In the early 1950s, Broyard had threatened to sue the publishers of a novel by Chandler Brossard, Who Walk in Darkness, which contained a character evidently based on him. It began: ‘People said Henry Porter was a Negro.’ In the version that was ...”

“... Palevsky (computer software), Sol Price (big-box retailing), Barry Diller (mass media) and Bill Gates Sr (corporate law). It is a New Deal coalition (Irishmen, Anglos, Italians, Jews) updated with one African-American man, Bill Cosby, and one Asian-American woman, Yoko Ono. (The supporting cast includes a host of awkwardly renamed figures from American ...”

“... which Aldiss mentions, seems to have come to life again in Tim Powers’s award-winning The Anubis Gates of 1985, a book which turns on the concept of exchanging souls, and ends with an amazing scene of Samuel Coleridge strolling stupefied through a London underworld peopled by genetic monstrosities, and releasing them all from their cages under the impression ...”

“... various modern scholars and writers, makes an impressive list. The best place to start – as David Stuttard does in his new biography – is family background. For all its democratic politics, Athenian society was intensely class-conscious. Although Alcibiades was a product of that complex network of upper-crust intermarried families which produced most ...”

“... but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then do another ‘Our Alan’ performance for a more general audience. 26 January. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by ...”

“... of an intelligence clearly capable of passing the 16th-century equivalent of the eleven plus; and David Starkey’s fluent and vivid account of her early life and apprenticeship. Starkey confesses to having half fallen in love with the young Elizabeth, but to be merely interested in the later Gloriana, ‘her face caked in carmine and white lead ... an ...”

“... an academic plaything for the exclusive use of ‘professional thinkers safe behind their college gates’ as a betrayal, not only of science and culture, but of society, too. Just as the new journalists on the Daily Mail and elsewhere were turning politics into a gaudy spectacle for the public to jeer at or occasionally cheer, the new philosophers were ...”

“... high boredom threshold. Indisputably the greatest game ever written for the BBC was Elite, by David Braben and Ian Bell. The aim was to travel through eight galaxies, each with 32 solar systems, trading cargo, battling enemies and becoming a steadily more feared space pirate. Not only were you able to save your progress as you went along, but the game ...”

“... has a telos: the fulfilment of the prophecy that the Messiah would be a descendant of the House of David. This precludes the pyrotechnic genealogical loops of the pagan gods, but it also illustrates the problem of genealogy more generally. Where to start and who to include? The Gospel of Luke takes the lineal patriarchal story back to Adam, which makes us all ...”

“... a couple of silly mistakes which Mr James and/or his proof-readers should have stopped. St Aid-gates for St Aldates twice on the same page (with St Aldates above them) is painful, and not just to Oxonians. Also what’s with Nuri Al Said? It was Nuri es Said in his late days. But overall, Mr James is fair, cool, straightforward and highly ...”

“... crisis of obesity, the topic has, as it were, ballooned. Forth’s book joins, among others, David and Fiona Haslam’s Fat, Gluttony and Sloth: Obesity in Literature, Art and Medicine (2009), Sander Gilman’s Obesity: The Biography (2010) and Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting over 2000 Years by Louise Foxcroft (2011). All of these are ...”

“... handling books. You see what’s not there. The Web makes millionaires (or billionaires, in Bill Gates’s case) early in life. By 1996, Amazon.com was offering visitors to its website a choice of 1.5 million titles. In late 1997 there are 2.5 million. This is not ‘stock’ in the traditional sense. Amazon.com does not ‘hold’ books. What it offers, via ...”

“... been dismissed. In 1937 the Nazis staged the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. (Salomon, David Foenkinos imagines in his novel, ‘positions herself on the side of the despised artists’.) In 1938, she submitted a piece for an anonymous fine arts competition; having picked it as the winner, the jury panicked when they discovered it was by a Jewish ...”

“... suburbs that surrounded it and had taken on its name. Though they poured right up to the gates of Hanmouth, they were obviously the city’s, Barnstaple’s, suburbs, not Hanmouth’s. Hanmouth could never have suburbs.’ A whiff of mystery and potential horror is almost enough to override the genteel town’s distaste, at least for a while. There ...”