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“... pure habit by this time, on the off-chance something will bite. He likes talking, but he likes sex more, and he never strays too far away. Here’s an example. James led to Edith Wharton, and that reminded Vidal of R.W.B. Lewis’s book, which mentioned that she’d met a smoldering young writer in Italy named Alberto Moravia. So Vidal called Moravia to ask if ...”

“... In the sweet by and by We shall meet on that beautiful shore … And our spirits shall sorrow no more. In Denmark, cowed into subservient neutrality since August 1914, the Illustreret Tidende dared to write that ‘the disaster was caused by a deliberate act of will on the part of a warmongering nation.’ The Norwegian Morgenbladet was sharper: ‘The ...”

“... and 18th-century still lifes: dead hares are a motif at the Wallace Collection, and you’re now more likely to come across a hare in art than you are anywhere else. The appetite has gone. Turner fished and shot not because he was conspicuous and wanted to show off but because he wasn’t and he didn’t: he was essentially frugal and self-sufficient, for ...”

“... his wife, to an open rehearsal of the Missa Solemnis, a work which would figure in Doctor Faustus more than twenty years later. ‘My chief impression,’ he wrote, ‘was of a remarkably handsome young man, Slavic in appearance and wearing a sort of Russian costume, with whom I established a kind of contact at a distance, since he noted my interest in him ...”

“... at the same time. Not so much a marketing disaster as a triumph, I’d say. In its own, rather more modest way, the ‘long awaited motorists’ driving manual’ 1288 (BBS, 317 pp., £18.99, 3 May 2000, 1 903029 00 7) by Derek Bracegirdle subverts certain assumptions, too. (I don’t understand the title.) The book, ‘probably the most ...”

“... for good plots. The best conspiracy-theory novels – Gravity’s Rainbow, for example – contain more fact than at first seems credible. But lots of people are dispiritingly willing to believe any old nonsense. This doesn’t much matter when the nonsense is The Da Vinci Code. It’s more of a problem when it’s something ...”

“... meant to kill zombies and zombies are meant to kill people, but there are players who think it’s more fun to attack their own kind. People who kill people are known as PKers. You can pick up objects of varying degrees of usefulness: baseball bats, bottles of beer, fire axes, first-aid kits, mobile phones, pistols, shotguns, spray cans etc. If you have a ...”

“... took over Piazza San Giuseppe to harangue a small crowd of supporters and passers-by. It was a far more modest affair than Berlusconi’s big-city extravaganzas: no young lovelies in their scanties, just a man with a megaphone. ‘Security is the first right of every citizen,’ he proclaimed, before accusing the left of stealing ideas from the right. He had a ...”

“... rules have had to be relaxed to include his descendants, as it turns out that the planet is even more promiscuous than the god was: according to the last count, it has at least 38 moons. ‘At some time in the future,’ the IAU warns, ‘it may be advisable to stop naming very small satellites.’ Most of Uranus’s satellites are named after characters in ...”

“... of architects with painters and sculptors as equal contributors to building projects, so that the more abstract practical and symbolic elements of architecture were enhanced and reinforced by figural narratives and allegories. Rykwert offers no actual examples of this prelapsarian practice in The Judicious Eye; it is left to the reader to imagine what he has ...”

“... were anyway sacked after 15 months. Not being a minister has given the former Young Conservative more time for writing. His 24th book is Neighbours from Hell: The Politics of Behaviour (Politico’s, £8.99). As its subtitle suggests, it isn’t a spin-off from the television programme of the same name, but a tract on anti-social behaviour, its supposed ...”

“... under the name Luther Blissett and written by four Bologna-based members of the LBP. It has sold more than 200,000 copies in Italy, and tens of thousands in the rest of Europe (Heinemann published it in English in 2003). Set in 16th-century Europe, it ranges across three decades and hundreds of miles, from Antwerp to Rome, through some of the bloodiest ...”

“... postal system was introduced in September 1968. The first first-class stamp cost 5d, a penny more than second-class. Like most innovations, it took a while to catch on. The secretary of the National Chamber of Trades called it a ‘confidence trick’. Now, almost a third of the more than 80 million letters posted in ...”

“... Responding to Marr’s comments, Ian Jack, the editor of Granta, suggested that it would be more accurate to say there was a ‘lull’. Since, then, Robert McCrum, the literary editor of the Observer, has discussed the question more than once in his column, ‘The World of Books’. And in a recent issue of the ...”

“... intelligence. He brought philosophical reflection to an opulent array of subjects, with more imagination and with greater cultural and historical understanding than anyone else of his time. The collections have been brought to publication by Williams’s widow, Patricia, in each case with the help of one of his friends, who has added an informative ...”