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“... I did not particularly like travel books,’ explains the rancorous writer-narrator in Paul Theroux’s recent novel My Secret History: ‘the form had fatal insufficiencies. It was usually geography, and potted history, and a kind of lifeless boasting about how far the writer had gone and what he ate.’ It’s a scattershot complaint, but well made all the same ...”

“... comparison with Nicolson. After Coats died in 1990, the diaries passed to Channon’s son, Paul, who died in 2007. Now, with the encouragement of his children, three formidable volumes have appeared, admirably edited by Simon Heffer, with profuse footnotes displaying considerable scholarship and intermittent pedantry.As Heffer says, Channon was seen as ...”

“... tenets of a faith they could no longer practise in England. ‘We shall find that the God of Israel is among us,’ he promised, ‘when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and a glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: the Lord make it like that of New England. For we must consider that ...”

“... a gentleman. (Hastings was greatly relieved when Utley left to write obituaries for the Times). Paul Johnson, once a rabid socialist and by now an equally rabid Tory, denounced him as ‘a swine and a guttersnipe of the lowest sort’. But the man whose opinion mattered most – perhaps the only man whose opinion mattered at all – was Black. He appears to ...”

“... Russia between 12,950 and 13,950, China between 184 and 240, France around 300, the UK 160, Israel between 60 and 200, India 60 or 70, Pakistan about 60 and North Korea five or six. Rhodes says that the most likely future exchange would be between India and Pakistan. If they were to throw all their nuclear weapons at one another, with a total yield of ...”

“... that ‘information wants to be free.’ Born in Illinois in 1938, Brand studied at Stanford with Paul Ehrlich, the biologist who wrongly predicted that human population growth would cause mass starvation in the 1980s. No such dour thoughts ever troubled Brand. After two years in the army, he tried LSD legally in 1962 as a scientific experiment. He took to ...”

“... Declaration of 1950 – an embargo agreed by Britain, the US and France on selling arms to Israel and its neighbouring Arab states – especially as France was selling Israel Mystère IV jets that outclassed anything the RAF had in the region. But Paris was more concerned about keeping its plans secret from ...”

“... of Christ that the Pharisees (but not the Sadducees) became believers in personal immortality, St Paul being their most famous Christian convert. Casey admires the ‘unflinching realism’ of Sheol, precisely because it is ‘the fate we could least hope for’, and thus places the human emphasis on life in this world. I think that what he likes about ...”

“... is time?’ St Augustine wondered. ‘Provided that no one asks me, I know.’ Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm explore the many answers proposed by writers, artists and visionaries in the Middle Ages. ‘Medieval people’, they write, were ‘more keenly aware of simultaneous and contending temporalities than we are, and more skilled at entertaining a wider ...”

“... cars.’ Note the ‘we’. By her own analysis, Gordimer has always been a legitimate target. Paul Bannerman, the central character in Get a Life, is a campaigning ecologist who, when the novel opens, is suffering from cancer. His treatment has left him radioactive and only his parents, regardless of the danger to their own health, are capable of the ...”

“... more pious tones, while falling far short of withdrawing their support for Trump. Listening to Paul Ryan, John McCain, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Orrin Hatch inveigh against the evil of white supremacy, you might have thought they’d just dusted off their copies of Between the World and Me. They can hardly claim to have been shocked by Trump’s ...”

“... who love the German language or who hope to find their roots. Others say they could not settle in Israel or the United States. A highly successful criminal lawyer hates Germans but loves defending the victims of German society. Recently he defended two hooligans who had robbed and strangled an old man. He prepared their defence with particular zeal when he ...”

“... armourers!’ The Argentine Air Force lost 74 strike aircraft during the Falklands campaign. Dr Paul Rogers, defence analyst at the University of Bradford, can show that they have been replaced by at least 107 new aircraft. In April 1982, only five Argentine aircraft were capable of delivering air-to-surface Exocet missiles. The number has now swollen to ...”

“... manuscript reflections in which he examined God’s purpose on a sinful earth, form the subject of Paul Seaver’s vivid miniature study Wallington’s World. It is here, rather than on Prestwich’s broad canvas, that we approach the kernel of Protestant experience. Wallington was a turner – a maker of wooden articles on lathes – who lived his long and in ...”

“... all this, it is hardly surprising to learn from the acknowledgments that he has been talking to Paul Auster, whose recent Oracle Night treats with some of the same topics. The Road to Delphi is very much Auster territory, emphasising the uncanny effects you can produce when you play Escheresque games with time and narrative, when the fuzzy prospect of an ...”