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“... usually depicted girt with serpents and skulls. The temple of Cihuacoatl was a low, dank, unlit lodge which Bernal Diaz compared to the jaws of hell. To be sure, women in labour were compared to warriors, the midwife greeting a successful delivery as a good battle, in which ‘the little woman had become a brave warrior, had taken a captive, had captured a ...”

“... who sought to arrange the passage of the Enclosure Bill through Parliament before Tooke could lodge a petition against it. Horne devised an outrageous ploy to block it: a libel on the Speaker, alleging partiality and implying bribery. Summoned to appear before an angry House of Commons, Horne astonished MPs by his respectful behaviour and respectable ...”

“... accession. Bernard Bergonzi’s The Roman Persuasion is attended by so many coincidental links to David Lodge’s recent How far can you go? that to remark on them is almost unavoidable. By ‘links’ I don’t mean influence, for they are books of very different kinds, and I should surmise from internal evidence that Bergonzi’s was written ...”

“... Americans seem to relish Presidential biographies. David McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker ...”

“... as critical principles.’ But the pressure of literary theory seems particularly regrettable in David Lodge’s essay on Milan Kundera. Much of it is an interesting, useful account of The Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but Lodge thinks it necessary to spend several pages working out his notion that ...”

“... French’s Bleeding Heart, Malcolm Bradbury’s Stepping Westward and Rates of Exchange, and David Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World. Now, all around the large cabin, other refugees from Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only and from Gene Wilder in The Woman in Red have their noses stuck into novels. Could it be that a certain kind of novel is ...”

“... both in his work and in his life. He collected photographs of his ancestors’ homes – Southcote Lodge in Reading, for example, which belonged to his grandfather Stanley Howard Hodgkin (1860-1945), and Shelleys in East Sussex, which was owned by John Eliot Hodgkin (1829-1912) – and he remembered in detail rooms and the individuals and things that existed ...”

“... Me an Anarchist describes how, after a short flirtation with the flute band of his local Orange lodge in Glasgow, the teenage Christie quickly graduated to the militant wing of CND. But his main political passion was Spain and the legacy of its Civil War, ‘the last purely idealistic cause of the 20th century’ and anarchism’s finest hour. Appalled by ...”

“... a pith helmet, bore a startling resemblance to the dome of his late masterpiece, the Viceroy’s Lodge in New Delhi. Lutyens could, however, charm and entertain in just the measure that the unequal relationship between client and architect favoured. The ghastly strings of puns, although alleviated by sudden moments of inspired wit and wordplay, wore out ...”

“... in an eternity of vain research along endless shelves.’ Jump forward seventy years, and for David Lodge’s Pooteresque Adam Appleby, the BM is a cosy, quintessentially safe asylum. Adam’s working life there is a matter of daily comforting rituals, as when he cools his research-fevered brow on the downstairs men’s lavatory cistern. The BM ...”

“... comparing himself to Jupiter, and to give up spending his weekends at the Lanterne, the hunting lodge of the Versailles palace, lest his monarchical provocations trigger more riots. But he can probably dispense with the helicopter on standby at the Élysée – the sansculottes are long ...”

“... To judge from this biography, the Sinn Féin leader still has some way to go. According to David Sharrock and Mark Devenport, Adams is a ruthless, scheming hypocrite who talks peace in front of the cameras, but in private continues to plot death and misery. He speaks of ‘inclusion’ and publicly condemns sectarianism, but has boasted that he would ...”

“... once more’; and if I had thought of it I would have borrowed a line from my friend David Lodge, who borrowed it from George and Ira Gershwin: ‘Nice work if you can get ...”

“... Did it hold the political whiphand? In the second volume of his trilogy on the City since 1815, David Kynaston repeatedly shows his familiarity with the controversies. But his technique is to deal fair-mindedly and unexceptionably with them, more or less in passing; the book makes no claim to be an incisive or provocative analysis of the City’s role in ...”

“... the past, would-be biographers have been discouraged from poking their noses into the business of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy ...”