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“... meccano-work of literary theory. In conclave with her admiring if sceptical husband in Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, Fanny Assingham remarks of her efforts on behalf of the Prince and Charlotte – efforts which involve, at the highest level, resources of query, speculation, understanding – that whatever happens it will all have been ‘great ...”

“... born, Jewish, Cambridge-educated, critically middle-aged etc), lecturer at Wrottesley Poly in the West Midlands, is discovered begowned (it being graduation day) screwing a begowned finalist on his office floor. It is not a joyous coupling. Sefton’s mind is not on the job, but on his office door which he fears may be unlocked. His mind slips back to an ...”

“... Roundabout in the East, Archway Tavern in the North, the Robin Hood Gate of Richmond Park in the West, and the Catford Odeon in the South. Eight of us are going to ride from John O’Groats to Land’s End: that way, because it is downhill, though into the wind, and easier to get back from, but most of all because we will fall among friends. Rose Hilton is ...”

“... a hundred years earlier, so profound was the transformation between the reigns of Henry VIII and James I. Despite rampantly high mortality rates, the population quadrupled to around 200,000, blurring the boundary between the medieval cities of London and Westminster. By 1600, hideously overcrowded tenements, with dozens of families sharing the same ...”

“... the empire market, Scots proved fast learners. It was two enterprising Scots, William Jardine and James Matheson, who forced opium on China in the 1820s. Their work was continued by Scottish bureaucrats like James Bruce, the 8th earl of Elgin, whose father stole the Parthenon Marbles from Greece. ‘I never felt so ashamed ...”

“... flunkeys and conspiracy theories, has obliged his administration’s scientific authorities, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, to tiptoe around his volcanic ego. The blithe inaction and bumbling born of ideological vanity have resulted in tens of thousands of avoidable deaths in both countries, with ethnic minorities heavily ...”

“... the behaviour and aspirations that Lüthy had deemed irrational. One could then go back to the West, and see many similarities before the arrival of Machiavelli, the first Western political philosopher to exclude anything ‘divine’ or ‘magical’ from his thinking. The irony was that Bloom and Moertono, on the same campus at the same time, were ...”

“... in the Welsh hills. When the river makes trouble for Tewkesbury, it begins there, far to the north-west, with downpours that take days to swell the Severn downstream. There’s time to act, and usually there’s no need; the river bloats out into the meadows of the floodplain for a few days, one or other of the usual handful of houses gets flooded, and the ...”

“... more than a professor of Byzantine studies … it would be absurd to cast him in the role of James Bond.’ In truth the war was enormously useful to him, allowing him to pursue his research. Afterwards he went to run the British Council in Athens, where the political climate was tense as Greece moved towards civil war, but society was lively. Among his ...”

“... a private prosecution against the magazine on a charge of blasphemous libel because of a poem by James Kirkup it had published which described Jesus having sex with a variety of men, including Pontius Pilate. John Mortimer and Geoffrey Robertson appeared for the defence, but lost. Gay News was fined and its publisher given a suspended prison sentence. ‘I ...”

“... is more direct: ‘Erected to the memory of the heroes … Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris, who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy, April 13, 1873.’ When EJI arrived in Montgomery there were more than fifty memorials of one sort or another to the glories of the Confederacy. They included a gold ...”

“... shows in the choice of musicals above all. The only musicals to get in are Singing in the Rain and West Side Story rather than films starring Ginger Rogers or Judy Garland or Rita Hayworth or Barbra Streisand, or films choreographed by Busby Berkeley, with his unique combination of low popular appeal and high cinematic art. Thomson is passionately ...”

“... of day begin to drowse. The rookeries are emptying, and their birds of prey making wing to the West End. Dollymops, cracksmen and gonophs are on the prowl. Susan (up from Mrs Sucksby’s kitchen in the Borough) and Caroline (one of Mrs Castaway’s girls in St Giles) will hunt together tonight. Caroline is on the game, an alley-cat who’ll lift her ...”

“... the drug-smuggling President of Panama whose airline tickets on one BCCI-sponsored spree down the West Coast of the United States cost $30,000; and Saddam Hussein, who managed not to pay back a loan of $12m on the grounds that he had a ‘special relationship’ with BCCI, in that it did not require him to make any special repayments. All this generosity to ...”

“... do documentaries.’ Quoting this bit of wit and wisdom in a recent New Yorker piece on Roberts, Anthony Lane wrote: ‘it shows … how remote she is from any European visions of cinema – not just from the relaxed, Old World attitude toward sex but from the European assumption (found lingering in the work of Americans like Robert Altman) that the scent of ...”