“... man of a certain age in a £500 overcoat. He will be accompanied by a toothsome brunette who may or may not be his undergraduate granddaughter up from the country to look at the Berninis. Or you may find yourself admiring the hair oil favoured by a man who is stepping out of an ...”

“... Empire from the 15th century until it was annexed to Russia in 1783 by Catherine the Great. On 18 May 1944, more than a hundred and eighty thousand Tatars – mostly women, children and the elderly, because the younger men were at the front – were rounded up and deported to the Central Asian republics, mainly to Uzbekistan, accused of collaborating with the ...”

“... conflict, and how relevant some of the ideas and attitudes involved still are. A word of warning may be in place. Professor Pagels often sets these Gospels, Secret Books, Epistles, Revelations (following her I shall refer to them collectively as Gospels) in parallel with the canonical Gospels – rightly, in a sense, since this is what the Gnostics ...”

“... are very tightly-laced and you cut at your peril. A snatch of dialogue or narrative on page 20 may be a plant for a twist in the story on page 220. Wodehouse himself could cut his novels when occasion demanded – i.e. when the payment for a shorter version was big enough. Sometimes top-paying American magazines, such as the Ladies’ Home Journal, would ...”

“... be, defamatory by a jury. To this uncertainty is added another: the cost. Who knows what damages may be awarded? Who knows at the start of a libel action what the lawyers’ bills will turn out to be? The Daily Mail defended a case against the Moonies. The paper had said that the church was in the habit of brainwashing its converts. When the first writ ...”

“... invite tears – and speculation about that curious organ, the eye of the traveller. The traveller may come from antique lands or from modern ones: the essential is that he comes from, which distinguishes him from the pilgrim, who journeys towards, defined by his objective, as the traveller is defined by his origin. Or often undefined. There has been a ...”

“... pieces of legislation, such as the Berne Convention, do not even venture to define what ‘work’ may be. ‘Literary work’ in copyright law is thus a semantic convenience of the same order as ‘John Doe’: what it is all depends. The legal fiction that the literary work has an abstract, single existence which accompanies but mysteriously transcends any ...”

“... be kept glowing if not with the secularist hot air which he and Cowling jointly despise. Cowling may well reply that the second and ‘larger’ work which he promises will set out all these matters. If so, it will have a hard time. At the end of this volume, at any rate, it is clear that Cowling’s thoughts, when they extract themselves from the activities ...”

“... Major John Wesley Powell’s pioneer navigation of the Canyon in 1869, the less committed among us may reflect that these approved ways of seeing the place are extremely time-consuming, and require the setting aside of three or more days of one’s time, and the advance booking of guides, livestock or equipment. That ...”

“... on the allegorical, metaphorical, allusive, offstage, imprecise and ambiguous uses of God.’We may wonder what sort of reservation hides in the large rather than small agreement. It seems likely that Barnes himself was not tempted by most of these literary sins, which would be banned for the good of literature. (The sin involving Oxford or Cambridge is ...”

“... entrée into the French King’s service. So leisurely a progress, though, suggests that it may be some time before the next volume or two can deal with the crucial periods when Choiseul was a minister. It is reasonable, then, to attempt to discern the merits of this book as it stands, a fragment of the torso. Clearly, it will have to be judged in due ...”

“... pompous and deranged. Talking badly in this way also becomes a way of not really thinking: we may, for example, call Parliament a ‘soap opera’ simply because we are staggeringly uninterested in what is happening in our own seat of government. Calling something ‘operatic’ is our way of avoiding finding out about it. Opera sits at the centre of a ...”

“... of the oddities was Hallucigenia, a small, spindly, spiky thing, yet with tubular organs, and what may or may not have been a head. The Cambrian ocean swarmed with sea-going arthropods: jointed-legged animals, now familiar as lobsters and lice, beetles and bees, spiders and scorpions. Their original discoverer C.D. Walcott ...”

“... of the arrogance of the strong and the shame of the weak, defeated Germans. The name of Hitler may not get much prominence in the book, the Nazi Party would figure only in the stories – some of them harrowing – of the ignorance of Allied efforts to de-Nazify school-teachers and censor school books, of arbitrary arrests of apparently innocent citizens ...”

“... the Parliament Bill a majority, he would have been excluded from the list by royal command. These may be ranked as small imprudences, however, and when they are set beside Lord Randolph Churchill’s relationship with Lord Rothschild no decline in standards is discernible. If ‘corruption’ is used in the narrow sense to denote the impingement of private ...”