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“... could not be analysed in The Spanish Armada, published in 1988 by the underwater archaeologist Colin Martin and the historian Geoffrey Parker. Of the hundred or so books marking the quatercentenary of the fleet’s defeat, theirs stood out for its fusion of archaeology and documentary evidence: a triumph of rubber and tweed underpinned by collegiate ...”

“... the best thing to do is to plunge into the middle or just beyond and then work back and forth as Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker do in The Spanish Armada. The first page shows Sir John Hawkins writing a dispatch to Walsingham dated from on board the Victory in the North Sea on 10 August 1588. Somewhere to leeward, in spite of the fierce running battle ...”

“... of philosophy to have special wisdom qualifications, would think it presumptuous to write them. Colin McGinn does concede that specialist skills in philosophy don’t in themselves constitute a licence to preach or judge (‘morality isn’t the kind of thing in which you can have a special expertise’), but he seems confident all the same that a ...”

“... Holiday sang – are part of a history that is erased with every new administration, with every Martin Luther King Day. But the return to chain gangs in the summer of 1995, the hitching of prisoners to posts in Alabama, the purging of books, both legal and religious, from prison libraries throughout the US right now, remind us that though the tree in Jena ...”

“... the buried root. These days she wears surgical gloves for all procedures. Back at the stage door, Colin hands me a copy of the London Evening Standard. Picture of you, he says. In fact, it’s a picture of me and Clair. We’re holding hands at an HIV charity dinner. We both look tremendously famous and happy. The flashlight has detached us from the ...”

“... building a fairer industrial society will be doomed to failure.’ This is the challenge to which Martin Ryle seeks to respond. In a closely-argued book he works his way through the relationship between green politics and the politics of the Left, and looks at other European countries where the green percentage of total votes cast in elections is ...”

“... of relationship, however, exists between newspapers and the national Establishment. On this point Martin Walker quotes approvingly the views of Wilbur Schramm: ‘Prestige papers are shaped, to an important degree, by what the leadership in the country wants to know and wants known. The leadership in the country is also shaped, to an important degree, by what ...”

“... Burrough’s great tetralogy is one precursor of this novel, but an even more obvious ancestor is Martin Amis’s Money. Both the style and the range of social observation in My Idea of Fun reveal a pupil who has laboured hard at his master’s exercises. But in one respect the pupil has already surpassed the master. Amis’s was the shocked reaction of a ...”

“... Mystery of Freemasonry Discover’d (1724) and Samuel Prichard’s Masonry Dissected (1730) to Martin Short’s Inside the Brotherhood: Further Secrets of the Freemasons (1989), the dominant genre in Masonic literature has been the ‘exposure’. Rituals, passwords, oaths, handshakes and symbolic imagery pique the curiosity of the uninitiated, or ...”

“... over to the queue marked Computer Sciences, leaving Midgley faced with Mr Horsfall and Martin. Mr Horsfall did not dye his hair nor wear an earring. His hair was now fashionably short but only because he had never got round to wearing it fashionably long. Nor had his son Martin ever ventured under the drier; his ...”

“... Angleton became convinced that Wilson was a Russian agent and he conveyed this certainty to Arthur Martin and Peter Wright. Arthur Martin took on board Angleton’s ‘certainty’ that Hugh Gaitskell, Wilson’s predecessor as leader of the Labour Party, had been poisoned by the Russians so that Wilson could take over the ...”

“... art. Should you decide to do so, however, you’d better watch out for Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn. Colin Renfrew, as he’s probably better known, is the author of Loot, Legitimacy and Ownership: The Ethical Crisis in Archaeology (Duckworth, £9.99). ‘Clandestine and unpublished digging of archaeological sites for gain, i.e. looting . . . is the source of ...”

“... Andy Martin is unlikely to convince many readers that Napoleon conquered Europe only as compensation for his inability to write a sentimental novel. His attention to the Emperor’s literary ambitions is, however, not unreasonable. Napoleon dreamed of literary as well as military glory, wrote copiously at various moments in his life, and had real talent for it (Sainte-Beuve called him ‘a great critic in his spare time’, while Thiers elevated him to ‘greatest writer of the century ...”

“... on the Doctor’s last four incarnations (in reverse order: Paul McGann, Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker, Peter Davison), though obviously no match for Tom Baker – at the controls of a souped-up Tardis. As I write, he’s at the mercy of a gang of obese aliens who’ve long been lurking behind the scenes at Downing St, and for complicated reasons have ...”

“... as well as satirise the paranoia which was exacerbated by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968 and seemed to find its justification in the Watergate revelations. Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate – an eerie anticipation published in 1959 and then turned into a Hollywood film which appeared during the Cuban ...”