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“... only a few flying hours away, it may be time to start reflecting on a very different type of tale. John Hu, the Hu in Jonathan Spence’s latest book, was a man without guile, and without luck. He travelled to France from Canton in 1722 as the employee of Jean-François Foucquet, a Jesuit missionary, but behaved in such a bizarre fashion that in 1723 he was ...”

“... of the habit of mind which sees the Party both as the hands which mould the clay and as the foot which turns the wheel. No other organisation has been quite so intimately and murderously intrusive in the lives of its people as the CPSU. Now, for the first time, it is beginning to realise that the social fabric is not putty or plastic in its hands. A new ...”

“... book puts it bluntly enough: ‘The north was terra incognita to [O’Connell]: he hardly ever set foot there, and on one spectacularly unsuccessful visit narrowly escaped ambush by booking coach-horses for one day and arriving, under a false name, in a coach bristling with blunderbusses, two days earlier.’ In other respects, it is to some degree true, as ...”

“... children’s book, it isn’t; nor is it run of the mill. It is the book which sowed the seed for John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, for Indiana Jones and James Bond, and though less slick than its successors, its anxieties and lunacies are more interesting. It isn’t suitable for children; perhaps not suitable at all.As a child Henry Rider Haggard was believed ...”

“... and apothecaries, arranged for bloodletting (from the ‘vein of the mother’, located on the foot), or – in truly desperate cases – beat their partners’ backs and abdomens.It’s likely that the majority of abortions were sought by married couples who did not want any more children, but these were entirely private and so have gone unrecorded. ...”

“... and melos. Like most Post-Modernist fantasies, Sabbatical takes a lot of unpacking. But this is John Barth in holiday mood, and a virtuoso display of techniques brought together from different kinds of novel is here frankly offered for enjoyment. One of its methods is purely realistic: it is full of information, for instance, about sailing in the Chesapeake ...”

“... that the screenplay is by Pasolini, and so it is. But not in the same way that the screenplay for John Huston’s The Bible is by Christopher Fry, or for Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ by Paul Schrader. Pasolini hasn’t really written this movie, he has made excerpts from the gospel and filmed them, either as images in the manner we have ...”

“... posthumous miracles had begun to be attributed to him, and he was officially canonised by Pope John XXII in 1320. The story, in outline, runs thus. On the morning of (probably) 26 November 1290, Cragh and Trahaearn ap Hywel, a fellow rebel, were led out from their prison in the de Briouze castle of Swansea to the place of execution, on rising ground ...”

“... Sir John Gielgud is 75. To hear him talk or watch him on the stage he seems much younger, whereas his recollections of the lions of the Edwardian theatre ought to put him well past his century. It’s an elastic life because baby Gielgud was so quick off the mark, the famous nose soon round the edge of the pram observing the odd behaviour of his Terry uncles and aunts ...”

“... frames: dense colour becomes a peep-hole. Sunlight flashing on pebbles beneath a fast stream. John Clare, in ‘Recollections after a Ramble’, writes of sitting by the banks of a river and thinking: ‘If I tumbled in/I should fall direct to heaven.’ The wet colour is hazy, soft; it does its best to subvert the over-emphatic actuality of the borrowed ...”

“... changed. Canada geese came years ago; now there are also Egyptian geese, and what I think are pink-foot geese. One winter I watched shoveller duck swimming round after each other in a circle. There are fewer tufted duck and mallard than there were. A couple of years ago, a pair of ruddy duck arrived: small, sexually aggressive stifftail ducks with bright blue ...”

“... seemed just a little less febrile, she could have passed in the outside world for vivacious. ‘John,’ I said, noticing how dull my voice sounded – and I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘John,’ she repeated, smiling. She gave me a long, appraising look. ‘So. What are you in ...”

“... behind some medlar trees. But what he saw, instead, was a ghostly troop: first the lay folk, on foot, weighed down by terrible burdens; then the clergy, bishops as well as monks, all black-cowled and weeping; another black-robed, fiery army of knights then rode by, on black chargers. All these numbers of the dead were suffering horrible tortures, the women ...”

“... the Grey Ghost, a trawler whose crew meets with a succession of grisly accidents. ‘I set my good foot on the toe of my hurt foot and pulled the spike out myself.’ James’s teeth are then bashed in, and he loses a large lump of his savings to a dentist. His friend Kelley is bitten by a shark and soon afterwards has an ...”

“... several of Vidal’s hours here have been spent discussing Montaigne (so he said) with Michael Foot. Sadly, when Vidal showed up on one of Newsnight’s election panels, Jeremy Paxman failed to cut him down to size. In fact, he didn’t even try. Vidal was allowed to preen himself at leisure. Next to him, the two British panellists – Lord Archer and Fay ...”