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“... pleasant opportunity to tell people twice their age what to do. At the time when the undergraduate John Henry Newman was delighting in the inexhaustible metaphorical riches of Aeschylus at Oxford, the students of Maynooth were being fed a philistine diet of papist apologetics and garbled chunks of scholasticism. It was well nigh impossible, given this dismal ...”

“... of railways into spaces where they had previously been completely absent, preservationists like John Ruskin and William Wordsworth (‘Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?’). The agents of Network Rail, who are building the Ordsall Chord, can and do portray themselves playing the Stephenson role. They claim originality: the ...”

“... connection with the homeland. Such rites of passage became the staple of popular fiction. In John Buchan’s The Half-Hearted, a cynical and lethargic young man is persuaded to use his knowledge of the Indian frontier to help foil an invasion, and the challenge transforms him. ‘Life was quick in his sinews, his brain was a weathercock, his strength was ...”

“... of battle. Stagnation of movement and morale was rarely alleviated, but when a major action came, the end was sudden and bloody: 17 of the 22 officers in his battalion were killed or wounded. Raymond Asquith did not ...”

“... fit the bare facts of the life. For one thing, Bowie hasn’t stopped singing about death since Major Tom drifted off into outer space in the late 1960s; ‘Here I am/Not quite dying’ goes the opening track on The Next Day. And what about the songs that don’t fit the facts? No one, as far as I’m aware, has suggested that ‘Sue (Or in a Season of ...”

“... this excuses the failure to issue warnings. Western forces were about to invade and destabilise a major Arab country: there would clearly be consequences. Before the Chilcot Report was published I interviewed Sir John Holmes, who in 2002 and 2003 was Britain’s ambassador in France. He told me there was ‘a lot of ...”

“... where the winter snow freezes with the greatest intensity’; in his case, Alpine riverbeds, the major source of rock crystal in Europe at the time. From this idea of the stone’s cold, magical transformation, it was given the name krystallos (Greek for ‘ice’). In fact it is a variety of quartz, formed from cooling magma in the earth’s crust.Voyage ...”

“... wood panelling, windows and the sky beyond, than it was in the collection’s former gallery in St John’s Wood, where it reflected a glass roof. You walk into it down a narrowing, steel-walled, waist-high passage, where black oil rises to the rim and stretches out all around you. The tank is neatly tailored to follow the room’s walls, mouldings and ...”

“... Chartered Accountants were a young professional organisation when, in 1888, they commissioned John Belcher to design their Institute on a site behind Moorgate. It is bordered by narrow streets – Great Swan Alley and Moorgate Place. The architect and the sculptor he commissioned, Hamo Thornycroft, were both members of the Art Workers’ Guild, and ...”

“... decided to show the world just how tough and resolute the civilian population of all Croatia’s major cities can be when faced with the prospect of a sustained attack by those gleaming Krajina missiles. After all, what is another Dresden or two when your country is stiffened by the backbone of a thousand years of national mythology? The slaughter witnessed ...”

“... by our bodies, have altered our relationship with pathogenic microorganisms – our only remaining major predators – as well as with ourselves, in terms both of social institutions and of inter-personal psychology. This process, too, began long ago, and could be illustrated by the history of the dog, whose domestication or, perhaps better, whose co-evolution ...”

“... was unanimous: he needed a novel. And here it is, a tome of his own: not the fifth book by a major writer of minor things but, as the cover flap has it (you can almost hear a sigh of relief issue from the colophon) the ‘highly anticipated first novel’ by the debut novelist David Means. As if to make up for lost time, Means has delivered not one novel ...”

“... skinhead, did not his clothes deny it.’ That quotation well illustrates the style in which John Fowles begins this historical novel, or mystery story, lingering over his descriptions. The reviewer-like use of the present tense, the schoolmasterly ‘not what it means today’, and the reference to ‘a modern skinhead’, invite readers to visualise ...”

“... here provide a fascinating context for, but do not in any way extend, the preoccupations of the major books. Their importance may rather be that they make it hard to distinguish between the two Empsons, the white-coated technocrat and the plain man costumed in tweedy prejudices. They suggest that, far from shelving his prejudices when he turned to ...”

“... once his reputation has passed a certain threshold, is immune from criticism. In the case of major artists, this can itself be destructive (it is possible to attribute Moore’s decline in the Sixties to such irresponsible cossetting), while feebler celebrities are merely given a licence to print money (literally – vide the misleading and ...”