“... to Labour – he had no interest in private luxury. Upper-class socialists like Hugh Dalton and Lord Longford occasionally alarmed him by raising the spectre of republicanism, but he found Attlee – once he had got used to him – greatly reassuring. In truth, no such nonsense ever stood a chance. King George and Queen Elizabeth were – deservedly – too ...”

“... house where in due time and after prolonged chanting on his part, a great star appeared and the Lord Maitreya came to him in splendour. And then Rosalid’s face shone with divine ecstasy (I quote Nitya) and she cried out repeatedly: ‘Do you see Him? Do you see Him? According to Nitya, Rosalind was the only one who actually did. Nitya’s beautiful story ...”

“... Indeed, ‘the pencil in our hand can be the automobile in our garage, the television in our home, the clothes, on our back.’ These are bold claims, given that technology is concerned with power as well as with design and function, and given that pencils, unlike steam engines or word-processors, depend mainly on human power for their use. Petroski, a ...”

“... the island: but this did not indicate that no one other than Lizzie could have been in the Borden home that morning. Taking up the analogy, the defence might even have pointed out that Crusoe’s own inference was scarcely watertight: suppose he had taken off his shoes the previous day to paddle and forgotten all about it? It is certainly striking, as ...”

“... takes a simple, or simple-minded, and by our standards barbaric view of the proceedings: the Lord was testing Abraham, who proved his obedience – that he feared God – by being prepared to sacrifice Isaac. It might appear that God here fails two tests – goodness and omniscience; but then, he moves in a mysterious way.) The most appealing voice in ...”

“... boarding-school, the boy had virtually no education; his mother preferred to keep him at home to go window-shopping with her, or to the cinema. These were the days of the double-feature, and he saw, he estimates, two hundred films a year. He had a crowd of relatives who are, in his view, spiteful, greedy, stupid and pathetic. They manifested ‘a ...”

“... stopped her: but who? She was beholden to nobody, and that was her proudest boast.’ Now, hearing home-going schoolchildren under the window she ‘squeezed her eyes shut and doubled herself over her knotted arms. It was a good sound ... but it hurt her.’ At 40 she has married ‘a kind and comical man for whom, though she was too distracted to express ...”

“... too. However layered with rocks and earth the roof, however stocked with freeze-drieds (praise the Lord!), however broad the door, how bullet proof, no matter how much water they have stored, until the radiation count all-clear broadcast (they don’t say how) on radio, when they can, but cautiously, then reappear, death got there before them, though they grow ...”

“... and late in action at Tunis and La Goleta. And en route to this Court with letters from my lord Don Juan and from the Duke of Sessa so that Your Majesty might show him favour he was captured in the galley Sol, he and his brother, who also served Your Majesty in the same campaigns, and they were taken to Algiers, where they spent such heritage as they ...”

“... out of the car to kiss Marie-Jo: at this hour the baby is always being pushed in her pram towards home by the nursemaid. One day Simenon was unable to stop on the narrow road because another car was approaching him, and, minutes later, the baby girl fell into a kind of coma. A doctor was called in at once, and he advised Simenon to pick the baby up and hold ...”

“... of reputation, with a talent which a recent reviewer has termed ‘prodigal’. He has returned to home ground for the Coronation street-party (now, it seems, hitched up with Margaret, the farmer’s daughter he played with as a child). But despite the feasting, this is not a prodigal’s return. ‘I mean to go on,’ he says. At the heart of this engrossing ...”

“... a sub-plot concerning a Mafia-type gangster, and the educated woman whom he marries and keeps at home among his relatives and dependants, before strangling her and burying the body in the back-garden. She hasn’t remained faithful to him: that’s what has brought on his homicidal outbreak. Her lover, Bertrand, is meanwhile obtaining absolution in a ...”

“... But the office itself ennobles.’ Mr Vidal works mostly in Italy, to avoid the fate of stay-at-home American writers, which is alcoholism, but he’s famous just the same, and also very rich, for the American public gives him money too. Amis warns us not ‘to indulge our vulgar delight in American vulgarity’. And to call much of what he reports simply ...”

“... as a boy. Thesiger’s uncle was Viceroy of India and the family included a general, an admiral, a Lord of Appeal, a High Court judge and a famous actor. As a small boy in Addis Ababa, which reeked excitingly of rancid butter and burning dung, he heard the throb of war drums and saw captive princes being led past in chains, a scene which implanted in him ‘a ...”

“... the first flying bomb landed on London. None of the characters in Unexploded is bombed out of a home, which makes a passage like this one seem oddly abstract: ‘Imagine it. You are lifted from your bed even before you hear the blast. The walls of your house are sucked in – a full ten inches – before they are pushed back out by a blast wind that ...”