“... Islamic studies was confined to a relatively small number of specialists. There is undoubtedly, as John Esposito, editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia, states in his Preface, a need for an ‘easily accessible major reference work’ in which students, journalists and political analysts can find ‘readily available and succinct information on contemporary Muslim ...”

“... were we to need reminding – that a death has meaning. ‘Tragedy, which might be noble,’ John Kerrigan remarks, ‘always, just the same, means waste’; as though some imagined economy has gone awry. Either there’s an anomaly in the system, or there’s no system. What happened at Dunblane is called a tragedy because we take it for granted that ...”

“... with a naturalistic account of sex and sexual pleasure that there was in France. The radical John Wilkes’s venture into sexual literature is so marginal that it doesn’t figure here at all; the conflation of liberty and libertinage in Don Giovanni’s famous aria would have fallen on uncomprehending ears. We do not quite know, as Porter and Hall point ...”

“... Himself.’ Chesterton saw a banner hanging between two tenement houses: ‘God Bless Christ the King,’ it said. From then on an authoritarian Church and a fragile, insecure State combined to produce a sort of dark ages. It was as though Ireland north and south vied with each other over who could produce the most sectarian state. Censorship, mass ...”

“... an expression of Britain’s shifting ‘governing traditions’. Both quote from the memoirs of John Robert Clynes, Labour leader between 1921 and 1922 and lord privy seal in 1924. Reflecting on meeting George V, Clynes could ‘not help marvelling at the strange turn of Fortune’s wheel’ that had brought him and his colleagues ‘to this pinnacle beside ...”

“... said to have put out the eyes of fifteen thousand Bulgarian warriors and sent them back to their king, guided by the men, just one in a hundred, who had been blinded in only one eye (the atrocity may be authentic, but the numbers are certainly too high). It was also under Basil that the Venetians received favourable trading status in Constantinople in return ...”

“... a bit of a kid in person, too. Adam Roberts thoughtfully includes among his appendices a memoir by John Addington Symonds in which he records the impression of something ‘almost childish’ about Tennyson’s metaphysical opinions, and you can see what he means: ‘I do not know whether to think the universe great or little,’ he records the great man ...”

“... into a full-blown paranoid belief that the security services were plotting a coup against him. John Major was not far behind. He would leave a cabinet discussion to go and read the latest edition of the Evening Standard in the anteroom, then come back to suggest they begin the discussion again in the light of what the Standard was saying. In his memoirs he ...”

“... questions. Sinfield quotes such choice examples as: ‘ “While we may hope for a happy ending to King Lear, Shakespeare’s conclusion is entirely fitting.” Discuss.’ Because the question is cast entirely in terms of demonstrating the exquisite fitness of every part of Shakespeare’s dramatic design, the apparently open discussion necessarily excludes ...”

“... banshees. But at the end of the last century M.R. James’s head lay easy, pillowed on Eton and King’s. In the introduction to this reissue, ‘Monty’s’ stories are made, by one of the Oxford Book editors, to look like a game which registers a displacement of the erotic. ‘Even the deepest friendship of his life, with James McBryde, stopped well ...”

“... a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John Aspinall. Patrician insolence has quite often appeared to express a perception of the activities of the levelling Labour governments which have come and gone since 1945. But there’s more of that in the second of the books than there is in the ...”

“... and a counterpoint to, a recent near-fatal illness, whose course he describes in ‘Travels with John Hunter’. (John Hunter is the name of a hospital.) Though Murray’s poem about his time in hospital seems meant as the book’s serious centrepiece, its stanzas keep veering off into nervous, dull jokes: ‘The only poet ...”

“... appears only once more in the Hebrew Bible, to describe Moses’s rush basket (translated in the King James Version as the ‘ark of bulrushes’). Origen had imagined a square pyramid floating on a raft, but Hugh understood that such a structure would capsize immediately. He gave the ark a hull, then placed a sloped roof on the top and a door and window at ...”

“... Like all the best whodunnits, it is a slow burner. A group of clever young men – Oliver Letwin, John Redwood, William Waldegrave, among others – gather in various restaurants and country house hotels to bat around ideas for reforming the financing of local governance, encouraged and provoked by their mentor, Lord Rothschild. They were much clearer about ...”

“... its – or her – place. A lovely thing. 31 December. Because some 25 years ago The Madness of King George was nominated for an Oscar, around Christmas we generally get a clutch of DVDs soliciting votes for the next year’s awards. Today it’s Call Me by Your Name, which has been much lauded, so much so that when we come to watch it this rather gets in ...”