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“... implausible recent claims is that 1.5 billion people watched the 2022 final in Doha. Football, as Jonathan Wilson has done as much as any football writer to demonstrate, matters in multiple dimensions, but the World Cup has a magnetism all its own, drawing in millions who don’t otherwise watch much football. Observing its rites and rituals sustains the ...”

“... may never have uttered these words, but they have become legendary, and they rankle with A.N. Wilson, whose new book is designed to cut Darwin down to size and discredit ‘Darwin-worshippers’ and their ‘new religion’. Wilson is impressed by Wilberforce’s arguments about ‘missing links’ and ‘reversion to ...”

“... and travel sanctions, then moved to cautious engagement: neither strategy made an impact. Andrew Wilson is more dispassionate than Brian Bennett, who was the UK ambassador in Minsk between 2003 and 2007 and remains angry at what he saw. Wilson devotes the first half of his book to an analysis of Belarusian history since ...”

“... and are the one in charge, even if you end up getting apples instead because the pears look bad. Jonathan Meades is a writer who understands the power of lists. In An Encyclopedia of Myself, he has written not so much an autobiography as a series of detailed inventories of English provincial life in the 1950s – a world of sadistic army majors and ...”

“... Clunis cases. (Ben Silcock climbed into the lions’ den at London Zoo; Christopher Clunis killed Jonathan Zito in a London Underground station.) The subsequent inquiry, the Ritchie Report, had a profound effect on mental health care: procedures became more formalised, tight systems of accountability were introduced, and it became difficult to act in a way ...”

“... hapless and despairing Clemenceau pleaded. ‘I find myself between Jesus Christ’ – Woodrow Wilson – ‘on one side and Napoleon Bonaparte’ – Lloyd George – ‘on the other.’ If only it were so simple. So much had been promised on all sides; so little, it transpired, could be delivered. Seldom had the disparity between the demagogic pledges of ...”

“... At a party given forty-odd years ago by the suddenly-famous Angus Wilson, Dwight Macdonald ‘introduced himself, American-style, to Rose Macaulay, describing himself as an editor of the Partisan Review and founder of his own journal Politics: she stared at him and said, “Have you come all the way across the room to tell me that? How kind ...”

“... a collection of essays which will be published later in the autumn, Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson are good enough to acknowledge this problem, and even admit that the essays collected in their book are likely to contain large errors. But they haven’t let this stand in their ...”

“... the key to Renaissance courtly poetry in its strategies for eliciting astonishment. Back home, Jonathan Bate is gobsmacked by the sheer Genius of Shakespeare. It’s perhaps as well to remember that in cooler moments Jonson complained that ‘Shakespeare wanted Art’ and Milton berated Charles I for preferring the Bard to more serious ...”

“... added range, the drawing on more and wider associations? In the case of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s Relevance, collaboration has been able to draw on feminine and masculine resources – although I am far too afraid of my feminist colleagues to say which resources are which. Anyway, like Gilbert and Sullivan, or Somerville and Ross, Sperber and ...”

“... an intellectual. But there is no chapter on Diderot. Nor, with the equivocal exception of Edmund Wilson, described as an admirable writer and investigator who was also a violent drunk, are there chapters on any other virtuous intellectuals. Orwell is named as a man who tried, as Wilson did, to investigate and verify: but ...”

“... have waited a long time for the definitive full-scale scholarly biography of Charles Lamb,’ Jonathan Bate asserts on the back cover of Eric Wilson’s book, ‘but now it has arrived.’ In fact, there is more good sense in Bate’s short introduction to the 1987 Oxford edition of the Essays of Elia than in ...”

“... oil as a foodstuff was its use as a coating to stop the tin used for canned food oxidising. As Jonathan Robins notes in Oil Palm: A Global History, ‘few people in the industrialised world ate much palm oil until the 1920s.’ In the United States, it wasn’t officially recognised as a food until 1930 (dairy farmers had fought hard against the new ...”

“... glumly, how far one can trust anything the British press writes about Ireland. In 1972 Harold Wilson met with IRA leaders in Dublin, and the next year the Northern Ireland Minister, Willie Whitelaw, made similar contacts. This utterly shocked opinion in every officers’ mess in Ulster – and in MI5, who took over intelligence operations there from MI6 ...”

“... reasons Mr Ponting felt that he should steer clear of me. As Bruce Laughland, his counsel, and Jonathan Caplan, the deputy counsel, were to reiterate in court, they were counsel for Mr Ponting and not Mr Dalyell. There were differences. For example, before the trial Mr Ponting said he did not share my contention that the Belgrano was sunk, above all ...”