Hints and tips:
...If you’re going to read it, you will probably appreciate it more if you read The Warden first. I was always a bit sceptical about reading a series of novels with a clerical setting. No more....
...As Abraham soon learnt, the college warden, John Sparrow, accepted his election only through gritted teeth. One of Abraham’s duties as the most junior fellow was to pour the wine at dinner....
...Back in London Nigel Farage of Ukip and Natalie Bennett of the Greens have no clue what the other one is talking about, so there is no room for anything other than mutual bewilderment....
...“Occupy is not affiliated to the Green party but I think everyone needs to recognise that Natalie Bennett will offer something really important to the democratic voter in the next election.”...
...The moose is not dressed as a traffic warden, the cars are just programmed to avoid it. It is part of an industry-wide effort to make driving safer....
...The pay of easyJet’s management is recommended by its remuneration committee, which comprises four of its non-executive directors: Charles Gurassa, David Bennett, Rigas Doganis and Andy Martin....
...Phil Bennett, a steelworker who led the 1977 team to New Zealand, stands out vividly amid a succession of soldiers and medics. Player selection has also been known to go awry....
...Gareth Edwards, John Dawes, Willie John McBride, David Duckham and Andy Irvine might have deserved it in another era but it was Wilkinson’s quiet demeanour which won the public vote....
...Yet the Eye came about by accident, the product largely of four extraordinary men, Christopher Booker, Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton and Paul Foot, who happened to be near-contemporaries at Shrewsbury...
...Or how about telling the traffic warden who has just ticketed your Volvo that she resembles President Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan?...
...He’s still smarting from a curiously erratic appearance a few days earlier on America Idol as a last-minute substitute for an under-the-weather Tony Bennett....
...After speaking to Bennett, I called a friend of mine who’s lived in York all his life, and asked him, one Yorkshire cynic to another, “Is this all bullshit?”...
...It’s a novel in which Naipaul takes Willie Chandran, his hero from Half A Life, through a process of midlife disillusion and idealistic political action, and back to England, where his spiritual restlessness...
International Edition