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“... on professionals the need to keep on working at the meaning of the text. John Blair and G.H. Martin scan the text for evidence of the state of Secular Minster Churches and Borough towns respectively. Howard Clarke, on the Domesday ‘satellites’, follows up Galbraith and presents a concise list of the MSS which contain the texts of the Domesday Book ...”

“... You had your 1917 in 1066,’ a Russian diplomat was once said to have told his British counterpart. The ruling class of England, and much of the rest of Britain, was re-created by the Norman Conquest. Most of the nobly born have at one time or another sought to find progenitors among the Companions of the Conqueror, and the words ‘noble’, ‘gentle’ and ‘aristocrat’ themselves come from French ...”

“... a poet for the wild Sixties. A provocative spin was given to the debate by Robert Bernard Martin in his Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (1980). Martin traced the Tennysonian gloom back to the fear of stigmatising illness. Young Alfred’s formative years, according to this biography, were haunted by ‘the dark ...”

“... access to the information designed to encrypt it? The answer, pioneered by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in the early 1970s, is to reject a principle of cryptography apparently so obvious as to go unchallenged until then: namely, that deciphering is the reverse of enciphering and that encryption and decryption keys are identical. Rejecting this ...”

“... hungry romantics, but martyrs. The plot, if it can be called one, is as follows. A man called Martin has committed a crime, the nature of which he has repressed. Fleeing a German who might be after him, he finds himself in a desert where he relinquishes the signs of his humanity – language, intelligence – in order to try to rebuild himself and his ...”

“... Being affectionate with numbers, endlessly wondering about them, loving them, is, though impersonal and bloodless, no more strange perhaps than being possessed by the endless ramifications of cricket or trout fishing. Being consumed by numbers to the exclusion of all else, sounds deranged. The Hungarian mathematician, Paul Erdös, number theorist and combinatorialist extraordinary, eccentric, socially dysfunctional, obsessive, childishly egocentric, helplessly dependent on fellow number freaks to feed him, transport him, put him up and put up with him, was certainly outside the normal range, but not insanely so ...”

“... Dickens), and neither do most authors from roughly the second half of the 20th century onwards. Martin Amis is not M.L. Amis. Between these two periods, however, this largely male habit of self-designation spreads thick and fast: H.G., T.S., W.B., E.M., D.H., L.P., W.H. and so on. No doubt some doctoral student will one day explain why. Perhaps it has to do ...”

“... the children are dead. In the same programme there’s another playlet, Advice to Iraqi Women by Martin Crimp. I’d dearly love to have written both of them and it would have done more good, I’m sure, than going on the march.15 December. As I’m correcting the proofs of this Diary the news breaks of the arrest of Saddam Hussein. It ought to matter, and ...”