The story of Dr Zhivago’s publication is, like the novel itself, a cat’s cradle, an eternal zigzag of plotlines, coincidences, inconsistencies and maddening disappearances.

The city of Hangchow, in the 13th century, was transfixed by food.

A Greek queen commanding a Persian naval squadron is only slightly more improbable than a 17th-century Italian woman becoming a much sought after professional painter of large narrative compositions with Biblical or classical subjects – many of which depict women’s rage and women’s victimisation.

For seven days Paris was like a sinking ship, filling with water from above and below, as its inhabitants took to the lifeboats. On 24 January 1910 the Assembly met to vote an emergency budget for the city and other regions hit by the flood. Members had to be rowed across the courtyard of the Palais Bourbon to take part.

She was exhibited as Miss Crachami, the Sicilian Fairy, or Sicilian Dwarf. Not much is known about her; what there is comes from a pamphlet written to accompany the original exhibition, three reports in the Times, a number of contemporary allusions, and several articles written for medical journals in a subsequent attempt to figure out her condition.

Why are our contemporaries so keen on buying and presumably reading the Iliad’s Iron Age reminiscence of Bronze Age combat?

The world is huge up high. I’m not daring in most things – I cross roads at the green man and wear my seatbelt on a plane even when the captain has switched off the light – but heights offer a brick-dust puzzle-solving shot of joy that nothing else matches.

For the murder to make sense, it must be true that somebody isn’t who we think they are – but who do we think they are? How do we know who is and who isn’t what they seem to be? How do the characters know? In essence, that is what detective fiction is: a mystery about which of a particular cast of characters isn’t who they say they are.

What if To The Stars exists because it’s safer to have Tom DeLonge let us believe in aliens with superior technology than it is to acknowledge that reality itself may be different from what we think it is, and that the US government doesn’t understand it either?

I am not interested in slumming, in showing off about my naughty hobbit habit. The idea of slumming is an attempt to negotiate a deal between the secret shameful self who just wants to gobble, gobble, gobble and an acceptable adult dinner-party persona. All of us were children once, and that should be enough.

In prelapsarian times, it was only ever a short step from the batting crease to the pulpit, as generations of cricketing vicars used the game that they played heartily, if not usually very well, on Saturday afternoon for a neighbourly source of Sunday metaphors with which to earth a sermon and reassure the congregation that the rules by which a good Anglican was urged to live were really no more arduous than those framed by the MCC.

Madonna is not a subject for easy writing. She is a commentary on something, but God knows on what.

I met Vikram Seth by chance, he met me by mistake. He sat down next to me at an occasion he had never meant to attend.

I should state up front that I am not a fan of programme fiction. Basically, I feel about it as towards new fiction from a developing nation with no literary tradition: I recognise that it has anthropological interest, and is compelling to those whose experience it describes, but I probably wouldn’t read it for fun.

‘You are invited by Les Temps modernes to attend a seminar on peace in the Middle East in Paris on 13 and 14 March this year. Please respond. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre.’ At first I thought the cable was a joke of some sort. It might just as well have been an invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial.