“... of fear on every bend and to overtake all motorised vehicles, took us almost 30 minutes. This means that in a rerun of Stage 16, with Armstrong starting at the bottom of the mountain and ending at the top, and ourselves setting off from the top and ending at the bottom, we would have beaten him by just under ten minutes. It later turns out that Armstrong ...”

“... devotee of the Bond books.) The author of Moscow Gold, ‘John Salisbury’, is in propria persona David Caute, present literary editor of the New Statesman. I don’t give anything away here, since the fact was divulged, with much nudging and winking, in the ‘Londoner’s Diary’ column of the Evening Standard – where the marriage of Barnes and Kavanagh ...”

“... get less than 50 per cent of the primary vote, the hectic dramas of late-night scrutineering. Like David Malouf, who has spoken of Australian election days as unacknowledged national carnivals, Hardjono enjoys them hugely. Better than most in early October, she also knew that there’s worse than Pauline Hanson. The election, in which the conservative ...”

“... with other footloose professors? There seems to be an ‘only connect’ issue somewhere here. David Trotter’s book begins with the word ‘perhaps’. It echoes in the mind for a while. He contends that in the fiction of Defoe and Dickens the metaphor of circulation of the blood, as proposed by William Harvey in 1616, marries with the metaphor of money ...”

“... I really didn’t know what was going to happen next. Nazi-Soviet pact? Not nice, but perhaps it means we shan’t be having to fight an alliance of three Fascist powers, including Franco’s Spain. Churchill as prime minister? All very well, but some of us remember the Dardanelles – and besides, look at the people around him! To be sure, reading the ...”

“... To understand Nicole Kidman, David Thomson argues, you need to see a film called In the Cut. Not because Kidman is in it. She isn’t. The film stars Meg Ryan, is directed by Jane Campion and tells the story of how a lonely creative writing teacher, Fran, becomes involved with a cop (Mark Ruffalo) who is investigating a string of particularly gruesome murders ...”

“... Iranian friends tell me that Ahmadinejad might be crazy, but he is not stupid. He really means what he says, and he really believes in an apocalyptic message.’ Lewis left no room for doubt: there is a widespread understanding, he said, that a religious war between Gog and Magog is on its way. The professor returned to his seat. I held my pen ...”

“... named for a person whose name we don’t recognise: ‘Bill Lawton’, ‘Ernst Hechinger’, ‘David Janiak’. ‘Bill Lawton’, a secret name uttered by children playing in their rooms, turns out to be Bin Laden translated into Americanese. ‘Ernst Hechinger’ turns out to have been the name Martin went under when he was involved in the German ...”

“... jetty was built only in 1912. Walkers could access one of the best beaches, at Port es Saies, by means of a rope hanging over the cliff.Victorians and Edwardians who took this sort of thing in their stride made Sark a tourist destination. Once steamers opened the Channel Islands to British travellers in the 1830s, Sark’s salubrious air and equable climate ...”

“... A revised edition of the Norton Anthology commissioned a translation of Beowulf from Heaney, and David Damrosch’s Longman Anthology of British Literature advocated a linguistically complicated idea of what ‘British’ meant. Sean Shesgreen’s ‘Short History of The Norton Anthology of English Literature’, published in Critical Inquiry in 2009, quotes ...”

“... law shall be enacted providing for the grant of a dissolution of a marriage’), oddly enough, means what it says. It is a fact, unlike the article which recognised the special position of the Catholic Church, which was merely a claim. And this is why it has been so difficult to remove and why the referendum failed in 1986 and why the result will be so ...”

“... which he exercises over their Counsels.’ Olcott made contact with a young Buddhist called Don David Hewavitarane, who took the name Anagarika Dharmapala (‘homeless protector of the Dharma’). Dharmapala’s status in Sri Lanka today is comparable with Gandhi’s in India, but though they were of the same generation, Dharmapala’s anti-Western ideas ...”

“... leave his desk, and that from now on he would be ‘editor emeritus’, adding that ‘“e” means you’re out, and “meritus” means you deserve it.’ Sometimes it’s possible to warm to the old monster. While it took Evans a long time to get over his sacking, he has by now come to terms with the man who sacked ...”

“... about the ‘true’ writings of Karl Ove Knausgaard, or the huge amount of attention paid to David Shields’s polemic Reality Hunger. Time and again we hear about a new desire for the real, about a realism which is realistic set against an avant-garde which isn’t, and so on. It’s disheartening that such simplistic oppositions are still being put ...”

“... neck’ (Roger Shattuck); ‘Sun neck cut’ (Beverley Bie Brahic); ‘Let the sun beheaded be’ (David Lehman); ‘Sun sundered head’ (Martin Sorrell); ‘Sun throat cut’ (Ron Padgett). The compression of this lurid image of the dawn must have greatly appealed to Beckett; indeed his streamlined version possibly takes its cue from the phrase, for it ...”