“... the one hand, he was a kind of comedian, a learned buffoon, a butt for courtly wits and poets like John Donne and Ben Jonson, who both knew him well. On the other hand, he was the immensely tough and courageous traveller, whose remarkable journeys through Europe and Asia were made almost entirely on foot. This is the boast entailed in his favourite description ...”

“... classed his enormous erudite books among the many that he refused on principle to read. John Evelyn, visiting Rome in 1644, was impressed when ‘with Dutch patience, he showed us his perpetual motions, catoptrics, magnetical experiments, models, and a thousand other crotchets and devices.’ He predicted that in a forthcoming book on obelisks ...”

“... it would need Europe to control its own reconstruction. For instance, if a Tuscan farmer wanted a John Deere tractor, he could pay for it directly in lire. The local Marshall Aid committee would co-ordinate the purchase: the lire went to the Italian government, which could use it for reconstruction, while the Marshall Aid dollars would be paid to ...”

“... was. Many contenders have tried to render Cavafy, but the edition Hockney came across must be John Mavrogordato’s, published by the Hogarth Press in 1951 (Rex Warner wrote the introduction). When Hockney’s prints were published a few years later, in 1967, Stephen Spender, a friend and early advocate, collaborated on a new translation with the ...”

“... College, Oxford had instilled a churchy disdain for low commercialism. Though he quickly tired of Christian ‘mumbo-jumbo’, he was a lifelong lover of churches. Hanson includes a letter from an early trip to northern France, which shows him already coming to understand Gothic cathedrals not as built expressions of doctrine but as outcrops of a landscape ...”

“... recollections. Today Samuel is best known for his work on popular memory and for History Workshop. John Merrick’s new selection of his essays aims to rectify that: it brings together a sample of Samuel’s historical studies, several of which are still thrilling to read, and most of which would have been difficult to get hold of without access to a good ...”

“... still has to be laboured, and Valladares labours it with authority, detail and style. He is a Christian anti-Communist, and organised protests against Castro’s turn towards the Soviet Union at the time of Mikoyan’s crucial visit to Havana in 1960; he was jailed early in 1961. According to another of his prison conversations – this time with ...”

“... weak introduction to his attack on the present Pope. Of course it is true, as O’Brien says, that John Paul II is an authoritarian and an obscurantist. (It could almost be said that these qualities come with the territory.) It is likewise the case that the Vatican and the Muslim extremists made common cause at the world population conference in Cairo. Yet ...”

“... and Dooey, is known as the Scratchings and is the site of a vanished settlement of the early Christian era. As a child in the Fifties I’d go out with friends and find horses’ teeth, packed oyster, mussel and clam shells, then sometimes bronze and iron pins, bits of ancient Celtic jewellery. One hot afternoon I uncovered a charred piece of wood with ...”

“... obligation and behaviour for more than two millennia. In Gilead, Robinson’s dying preacher, John Ames, ruminates that we are ‘a little civilisation built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilisations’, and the explicit argument of Reading Genesis is that we fail adequately to understand this patrimony. We are diminished by this, and so is ...”

“... special interests and ignorance. Hence, on the one hand, the adventures of people like North, John Poindexter, Dennis Ross, Howard Teicher and Michael Ledeen, and, on the other hand, the amazing pudeur of the Secretary of State, whose position on Irangate matters, according to the Tower Report, was one of complete detachment. Representative Tom Lantos of ...”

“... sight of fertile land, making generalisations about peasant life difficult. Buñuel’s biographer John Baxter writes about Las Hurdes: ‘The lowlands, Las Hurdes Bajas, were lush and prosperous, but the flinty uplands behind them, Las Hurdes Altas, were among the most deprived areas in Spain. The peasants … lived in medieval conditions, ravaged by ...”

“... Highgate.’ He adapts the tone and texture of other ex-spooks who ‘went over’: Ian Fleming, John le Carré. He admits that his dialogue is invented, all his East End villains are squeezed into one composite character, Mickey Williams. MI6 became nervous of the Marks connection in the wake of the Littlejohn affair, two brothers they had sponsored, going ...”

“... left – does. Jeremy Corbyn is out of the party and won as an independent at the last election; John McDonnell had the whip suspended in July for voting against the new Labour government to scrap the two-child limit for Universal Credit or child tax credits; Ken Livingstone has Alzheimer’s. Their shared mentor, Tony Benn, is long dead. Beckett is an ...”

“... must be partly the help more recently given by such learned work on the art of inscriptions as John Sparrow’s, whose Visible Words, Line upon Line and Lapidaria are gratefully quoted in this and the following paragraph. For some three hundred years after the mid-15th century, a new art born in Italy swept Europe, accompanying the greater visual ...”