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“... of the 17th century and the rise of philosophical rationality. It is one of the many virtues of Harold Cook’s Matters of Exchange that it treats these as different aspects of the same story. So start with the VOC want-list and ask two questions: What were the goods good for? What did you have to know to get them, get them back home, get them rendered ...”

“... police with dogs. Men, women and kids are punched, kicked and arrested for picking coal to cook with and to keep warm. Many of them are left bleeding and bruised. This happened on 12 October (19 arrests). On Sunday 16 October it happened again: 120 riot-clad police against sixty or seventy people, mainly middle-aged men – most of them with bad chests ...”

“... One of the many welcome aspects of Gorbachev’s glasnost is that it has made possible a mutual East-West re-examination of the twists and turns in the record of Cold War conflict and confrontation. Last February, for example, there was a gathering in Moscow of top-level participants in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, from both the White House and the Kremlin: they were meeting to discuss how those events unfolded in each capital, and how decisions were made on each side, almost minute by minute ...”

“... Cohen. What about the landmines?’ What about the landmines? On 12 May Robin Cook announced the Government’s first leftward shift. Labour would abandon Tory foreign policy, whose futile cynicism had been dissected in the Arms-to-Iraq inquiry. Britain’s relations with the rest of the world would now have ‘an ethical ...”

“... obituary, in the Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society, of Sir William Cook, scientific director of the Grapple test series; some recent disclosures on the part of John Ward, who was employed at the British nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston for six months during 1955; and a group of declassified US documents obtained by ...”

“... told me to read an article in the New Statesman, ‘The Death of Miss Murrell’ by Judith Cook. Some two days later, since I read the New Statesman and the London Review of Books on trains and aircraft between London and Scotland, I glanced at Mrs Cook’s piece, and was arrested by the following passage: ‘Yet the ...”

“... of speech which would appear to be corroborated by science. The publication in this country of Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, a best-seller in the US, is therefore particularly timely. McGee, one of those rare people who is as much at home wielding scientific terminology as he is discussing Carême’s ...”

“... like a geyser’. Here young Stiffy Byng pleads to him the cause of her beloved, the curate Harold ‘Stinker’ Pinker: ‘You know that vicarage you have in your gift, Uncle Watkyn! What Harold and I were thinking was that you might give him that and then we could get married at once. You see, apart from the ...”

“... one is worth his weight in gold.’ And here is the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock on drummer Paul Cook: ‘that steady rhythm of his was the whole backbone of the Pistols’ sound.’ Then you have the singer, the showman – who probably does the lyrics too; and the lead guitarist, who probably comes up with the music; not forgetting the ...”

“... Hanson, his gentle Yorkshire lilt fascinated her almost as much as his millions. She assumed, as Harold Wilson had several years previously, that Hanson was typical of the self-made man, the hard-working puritan who started at the bottom and worked twenty hours a day until he achieved fame and fortune. Like Wilson, Hanson came from ...”

“... including the head of a 13th-century Buddha carved from sandstone, to a Scarfe cartoon of Harold Wilson with his lolling tongue in close proximity to Lyndon Johnson’s bottom (‘Vietnam: Wilson right behind Johnson’, 30 April 1965). ‘I’ve heard of a special relationship,’ the president muses, hitching up his trousers, ‘but this is ...”

“... of some of history’s ‘higher cribbers’: Borges, Montaigne, Stevenson, Eliot, Mann and Harold Bloom; Michel Tournier and Alain Robbe-Grillet; pretend pretenders to the throne, Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel; Napoleon’s chef Dunand; and ‘the genitally preoccupied Roman epigrammatist Martial’. I found some of the recipes in The Plagiarist in ...”

“... more precisely what they sounded like’), or an Etonian in Dominica who had married his black cook (‘a most depraved-looking middle-aged man, straight out of Maugham, with the glazed eyes of a drug addict and the aggressive manner of the socially ostracised’): these are the phrases which best encapsulate his foreign journeys. Travel for Pope-Hennessy ...”

“... ground. Across three fragments appearing over thirty pages in Nocilla Experience, a doctor called Harold, who has suffered a breakdown after a divorce, spends three and a half years losing at tennis to his 1979 Atari, eating every packet of cornflakes in the supermarket that has a sell-by date the same as his ex-wife’s birthday (a premise lifted from Wong ...”

“... it, how lively most of the book is, and how funny, too. Mars-Jones is challenging us, rather as Harold Brodkey did in his enormous, microscopically narcissistic novel, The Runaway Soul, to keep up with the book’s massive deceleration. Unlike Brodkey, Mars-Jones is witty. So the novel displays an amusing self-consciousness about the sluggishness of its ...”