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“... and outside of churches. Images of the Virgin and saints also decorated public buildings, city gates, private houses and even street corners. Their ubiquity underlined the idea that the faithful on earth belonged to a much larger community which also embraced the dead in purgatory and the saints already in heaven, not to mention innumerable angels of ...”

“... during the Cuban crisis Macmillan kept sending telegrams to Washington which his own Ambassador, David Ormsby-Gore, tore up, describing them as ‘practically incomprehensible’ and ‘wholly out of order’. Cradock doesn’t see Cuba as a Kennedy triumph – JFK used brother Bobby’s backchannel route to the Soviet Ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, to ...”

“... invisible from the road, its presence marked only by a dilapidated octagonal lodge beside rusty gates. Who knew what relics of its former chatelaine’s Shakespearean activities the place might conceal? An unaccustomed peep into Debrett’s Peerage revealed that Christ Church, the Oxford college to which I was then attached, was the one attended by ...”

“... like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for example, who took over as chief of the Soviet Bloc Division in the CIA’s clandestine wing in 1971 – Angleton would schedule time for ‘the briefing’. He didn’t tell Blee what it was all about in twenty minutes: he walked him through ...”

“... describes is a traveller’s nightmare: Englishness lost, identity cancelled, fatal infection,’ David Seabrook writes of Thomas De Quincey. Of himself, the dole-queue De Quincey, making a high-velocity, long-term progress through the Isle of Thanet. More speed, less haste: Seabrook is a master of the throwaway put-down, a speculator in tachist ...”

“... wore the face of American nationalism, did the global Olympic village have an enemy guarding its gates or merely another voyeur? It was difficult not to see the bombing as retribution for the extraordinary self-promotion that brought the Olympics to Atlanta and, to the consternation even of American journalists, dominated the competition. In violation of ...”

“... in any other. (I’ve been told that senses are sometimes given to concepts at Oxford after the gates close to visitors; but that may be a leg-pull.) Nor am I clear what you’re supposed to do with a notion once a sense has been given it. There used to be a story according to which empirical inquiry works by first giving senses to notions, and then ...”

“... wistfully of seeing Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too. And Tom Stoppard, another follower, has a striking set-piece in The Real Thing in which a playwright, explaining dramatic technique, says: ‘What we’re trying to do is to write ...”

“... York Times critic Anatole Broyard, who died in 1990, was unmasked in the New Yorker by Henry Louis Gates. In the early 1950s, Broyard had threatened to sue the publishers of a novel by Chandler Brossard, Who Walk in Darkness, which contained a character evidently based on him. It began: ‘People said Henry Porter was a Negro.’ In the version that was ...”

“... and has given rise to great unease, even evasiveness, among liberal commentators in Israel. David Shulman’s afterword to this edition is an impressive exception. Khirbet Khizeh is an Arab village, which is captured – more or less without a fight – by a detachment of Israeli soldiers in the 1948 war. (The word khirbah in Arabic, like the Hebrew ...”

“... but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then do another ‘Our Alan’ performance for a more general audience. 26 January. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by ...”

“... an academic plaything for the exclusive use of ‘professional thinkers safe behind their college gates’ as a betrayal, not only of science and culture, but of society, too. Just as the new journalists on the Daily Mail and elsewhere were turning politics into a gaudy spectacle for the public to jeer at or occasionally cheer, the new philosophers were ...”

“... which Aldiss mentions, seems to have come to life again in Tim Powers’s award-winning The Anubis Gates of 1985, a book which turns on the concept of exchanging souls, and ends with an amazing scene of Samuel Coleridge strolling stupefied through a London underworld peopled by genetic monstrosities, and releasing them all from their cages under the impression ...”

“... high boredom threshold. Indisputably the greatest game ever written for the BBC was Elite, by David Braben and Ian Bell. The aim was to travel through eight galaxies, each with 32 solar systems, trading cargo, battling enemies and becoming a steadily more feared space pirate. Not only were you able to save your progress as you went along, but the game ...”

“... of an intelligence clearly capable of passing the 16th-century equivalent of the eleven plus; and David Starkey’s fluent and vivid account of her early life and apprenticeship. Starkey confesses to having half fallen in love with the young Elizabeth, but to be merely interested in the later Gloriana, ‘her face caked in carmine and white lead ... an ...”