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“... on the feasts of Christ and Mary and the times of fasting. Legenda means ‘material to be read’; saints’ legends took their name from the fact that they were read in church on the appropriate days. Grounded in sacred presence, integrated with the rhythms of summer and winter, seed time and harvest, the Legend ...”

“... I am reading Dehaene’s book. I think I can process the word ‘occupied’ – the last word I read before putting the book aside for a moment – while also taking in the rattle. Can I really? It does take a certain kind of settling-in, but there they are, the two of them. Maybe this is a case where the pair comprises one item? Some ways of counting items ...”

“... to Ian)? Was Barbara Skelton having an affair with the Polish war artist Feliks Topolski when Peter Quennell came onto the scene, still married to his third wife, Glur, but making Topolski so jealous that the men resorted to fisticuffs over Barbara? What made Janetta, still married to Hugh Slater, fall in love with Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, and would that ...”

“... to the Egyptologist E.A. Wallis Budge, when the British Museum assistant George Smith first read the cuneiform in 1872, he ‘jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself’.The tablet was one of more than thirty thousand that formed the Royal Library at Nineveh ...”

“... seemingly indifferent to the internal regulation of its direction. It is this focus which informs Peter Goodrich’s Languages of Law. The book appears to be a collection of disparate essays, oddly connected and repetitive, but which nevertheless circle back obsessively to the question of how the law sustains its own authority. Goodrich continually queries ...”

“... The dead writers,’ Eliot said, ‘are that which we know.’ They are also, Peter Ackroyd might want to add, that which we don’t know we know or wish we knew better, agents of prodigious but incomplete hauntings. From The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde to Chatterton, Ackroyd has shown himself an adept in the speech of such ghosts ...”

“... install itself in every part of the Labour machine’. The authors ‘expose the machinations of Peter Mandelson ... whose regime and methods can be rivalled only by that of Bernard Ingham’ etc. In fact, although Heffernan and Marqusee have written the book in an ‘openly partisan spirit’ (we ‘have an indictment to make and we make no apologies for ...”

“... vaguely coloured with nostalgia. They don’t engage my imagination. Even as a child, though I read about polar explorers and enjoyed the mise-en-scène of polar bears, white-outs, ice floes and the rest, the word ‘north’ exercised over me little of the magic it has for so many others, including Kavenna and ...”

“... evidence, and that misinterpreted. It is certainly difficult to see how anyone who has actually read Buchan, Sapper and Yates can yoke the first with the other two. For the difference in flavour – between decency and indecency – compare these three bouts between hero and foreigner. Hannay v. Colonel von Stumm in Greenmantle: He half tripped over a ...”

“... of the belief that Hitler has a specific history in German Romanticism. It is a delusion which Peter Paret and especially William Vaughan are quite ready to take for reality, while Norman Stone’s own dreams about ‘the positive qualities of Hitler, his real achievements’ (thus Professor J.H. Plumb’s Introduction) aid and abet it: if Hitler was some ...”

“... I have been persuaded of the rightness of the moral position advocated in Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation for the past twenty years. There is, in my view, no moral justification whatever for the human exploitation of animals. I was convinced of this principally by reading the path-breaking book, Animals Men and Morals (1971), edited by Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch and John Harris ...”

“... British Intelligence to the element which best suits it: farce. At one level this book can be read as a series of Hilarious Tales. It describes, for instance, the elaborate plan by the CIA and MI6 in the early Fifties to tunnel into the Russian sector of Berlin, so that communications from there could be ‘monitored’. The plan was called Operation ...”

“... a folder with these words on the cover: NOT TO BE HANDLED BY PATIENT. I open up the folder and read as much as possible without Bertha noticing: ‘In situ carcinoma. Some spread to the lymphatic area.’ I thought they didn’t know yet if cancer had spread to the lymph glands. I assumed they’d taken the lymph glands out to see if it had spread. I’m ...”

“... real estate was cheap, plentiful and luring the likes of Tom McGuane, Tim Cahill, Jeff Bridges, Peter Fonda and the late Seymor Lawrence. Frontier towns like Livingston and Boulder Creek are today about as close as you can get to a nursing home for Sixties’ veterans and survivors of the more recent Hollywood filmscript wars – complete with a beanery in ...”

“... to turn round and tell you it isn’t? This test is, however, triumphantly passed by Ann Barr, Peter York and the intrepid and diligent team of assistant fieldworkers with whom they have penetrated far and deep into the rose-red canyons of SW3, 1, 7, 10, 6 and 5 – correctly ranked in that order – and the near- and far-flung outposts where there ...”