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“... John Bayley’s new novel is largely about those who are had on, or taken in, and this may well include his readers, who need to keep their wits about them. To begin with, he conjures up a couple of innocents. There was an innocent, too, as hero in his last novel, In Another Country, published in 1955. But Oliver, a young officer with the British army of occupation, was a worrier and a sensitive, risking trouble for the sake of his German girlfriend, and contrasted with his hideously successful rival ...”

“... into muscle and gristle and blood?’ Thus muses the first-person narrator of Life-Size, five foot two inches, weighing less than seventy pounds; Josie, a graduate student in economics, is far advanced along the line of self-starvation. Anorexia nervosa has her in its grip. She has gone far beyond temperance – the observation quoted above needn’t seem ...”

“... city of Agra, four hundred miles to the north, and it is a fairly safe bet that he had done so on foot. Coryate is not much heard of nowadays, but in his time he was famous. I have always been curious about him, and finding myself in India earlier this year I decided to visit some of the cities associated with his last journey, of which very little is ...”

“... contemporary deference to the power of market forces. The rare occasions when Burchfield puts his foot down are not much more satisfactory. Of ‘the regrettable type between you and I’ he writes that it ‘must be condemned at once. Anyone who uses it now lives in a grammarless cavern in which no distinction is recognised between a grammatical object and a ...”

“... snouts. From the boat, as a boy, I even saw a pike break water to catch a duck by its webbed foot as it tried to get airborne and then drag it under.I’m a fly fisherman now, a proud descendant forty million years removed of Denisova Man, who evolved out of his Siberian cave to walk upright in order to catch fish from the rivers and oceans, to scarf all ...”

“... the fact that Matthew and Mark record the last words of Jesus as spoken in Aramaic, while Luke and John offer a different version, in Greek. But although Mark, followed by Matthew, offers various sayings in Aramaic he immediately translates them into Greek. The evangelists were addressing not only Gentiles but the large number of Jews whose ordinary language ...”

“... resurrected for some time to come. Coincident with the end of socialism in any meaningful sense, John Gray tells us that ‘a liberal political philosophy is an impossibility,’ and Ted Honderich announces that Conservatism is a nullity. If both of them are right and can be taken at face value, there does not seem to be much left. Dr Gray’s original ...”

“... In 1738 John Rocque, a Frenchman, began his survey of London. His map (engraved by John Pine) covers an area from Marylebone and Chelsea in the west to Stepney and Deptford in the east. It was finally published in 1747. Pasted together, its 24 sheets measure 13 x 6 ½ feet – that is how it is shown in the exhibition London 1753 at the British Museum until 23 November ...”

“... ceremonial duties such as mounting a guard of honour for the arrival of the new governor, Hugh Foot. They also helped out in moments of difficulty, such as the emergency triggered in August 1951 by Hurricane Charlie. This was Jamaica’s greatest natural disaster of the 20th century, with 17 inches of rainfall in a few hours, gusts of 125 mph, more than ...”

“... off to the healing field, where one poor woman had the foulest job of the festival: she was giving foot massages to people who hadn’t bathed for at least two days. It may well have been that she was too spiritual to notice such things.Glastonbury has the reputation of being full of 16-year-olds from Winchester and terrible students intent on drinking ...”

“... of a mass of detail, as if the sheer weight of her protestations would convince the world that John, as she calls him, was not guilty. It doesn’t work, even though one agrees that the coroner’s verdict naming Lucan as the murderer was unfairly reached, and it must have been a heartbreaking task. Marnham’s book is more reflective and very much ...”

“... exact in trapping the stage of semantic decay which had set in among words, and he hardly puts a foot wrong in his displacement of idiom. The text is replete with proverbs, saws, stock formulas, all chosen with remarkable taste. There are also numerous snatches of riddles, children’s rhymes, catches and ballads – the detective is always overhearing ...”

“... I can, for example, think of no painter who gives a fairer account than Champaigne of the foot – a part of the body which is often underanalysed, even when the structure of face and hands has been thought through.Pascal’s comment on the vanity of an art which is admired for achieving likenesses of things that are not admired in themselves is ...”

“... era of multi-party democracy. Mrs Thatcher had been eighteen months in Downing Street, and Michael Foot had become the Labour leader three months before. Britain was being pulled apart by ideology and extremism. We would draw into politics people of talent and good will – the ‘political virgins’ – who were alienated by the dogmatism and sterility of ...”

“... and that Little Dorrit is a favourite in the Home Office.’ Lawyers these days doubtless read John Mortimer, and dons read the new university wits like David Lodge and Tom Sharpe. But in any wider competition for the post of English humorist-in-residence, Michael Frayn would surely be a prime contender. Now verging on sixty, his collected plays and ...”