“... book.’ If a book can’t be recast in its subtitle as the biography of its subject, the next best thing is for it to appear as a self-help book. Alain de Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy, a model of its kind, came out in paperback in the spring. Playing, in a manner of speaking, Achilles to de Botton’s tortoise, ...”

“... on the fly for anonymous intimates’. And they are, on the whole, a diverting enough bunch. The best of the lot, though, is the diary of Samuel Pepys, which a web designer called Phil Gyford has been posting in daily instalments since 2003, using the text already online at Project Gutenberg. It doesn’t exactly not fit in here, which rather puts paid to ...”

“... on the smooth-talking thug and would-be businessman Stringer Bell from The Wire. But the word that best captures Saif Gaddafi comes from Nicholas Shaxson’s blistering account of the role that tax havens play in international finance. Shaxson doesn’t discuss the Gaddafis themselves, but he does paint a picture of the ...”

“... and rearranged version of Tocqueville’s itinerary, and he does so not in the company of his best friend but of his newly acquired English servant, John Larrit. And, unlike Tocqueville, Olivier falls in love. His romance with Amelia Godefroy, the daughter of a governor of Wethersfield prison in Connecticut (which Tocqueville also visited), takes on the ...”

“... While walking down Sackville Street in London in 1942, Nicholas Jenkins’s attention was unequivocally demanded by the hurricane-like imminence of a thickset general, obviously of high rank, wearing enormous horn-rimmed spectacles. He had just burst from a flagged staff-car almost before it had drawn up by the kerb ...”

“... better taste than their lives. ‘Real artists are not nice people,’ Auden wrote. ‘All their best feelings go into their work and life has the residue.’The Habit of Art was not easy to write though its form is quite simple, because so much information had to be passed over to the audience about Auden and his life and about Britten and his and about ...”

“... When Robert Stone’s best-known novel, Dog Soldiers, was published in 1974, there was a small but significant overlap of material with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s souped-up, superheated journalistic account of the beginnings of the counterculture, published six years earlier. The coincidence of material was in many ways inevitable ...”

“... in 1983 as La Rampe. ‘Footlights’ conveys the word’s primary meaning, as the translator, Nicholas Elliott, says: ‘the row of spotlights that line the front of a theatre stage’. But the French also means ‘ramp’ and, in its verb form, ‘to crawl’. Daney offers an intriguing usage at the bottom of his second page. The lights failed to hold ...”

“... still in print) and it is only touched on by Boucher. His most successful buildings are among the best known in the world – the Mint, the Library and the Loggetta around St Mark’s. They have a plasticity, a richness of modelling and relief, which were without precedent in Renaissance architecture. The wall is replaced by swelling columns and ornamental ...”

“... screen. Desperately, he tries to repeat the procedures that led to this fleeting vision, but the best he can come up with is a shadowy shape like a hand: the print-out is inconclusive. The substance and meaning of this scene are entirely determined by Roger and his way of seeing things. In Roger’s version Dale’s bid to find God on his VDU is an act of ...”

“... there was more of this in Nationalist Spain. The Italian section of the exhibition is by far the best selected and designed. It is also the most interesting and coherent because it was only in Italy that painting seems to have had a consistent relationship with the other arts, and only there that the ideas of modernists and traditionalists were consistently ...”

“... targets, or are simply generalised types. Occasionally Peacock adds a twist. In his third and now best-known novel, Nightmare Abbey (1818), Mr Glowry, the ‘atrabilarious’ patriarch of the estate, employs only servants who reflect his melancholy by means of ‘a long face or a dismal name’: Raven, Crow, Skellet, Mattocks, Graves. When in need of a new ...”

“... for thirty years: the verdant sward, the August sun, the eager, shirt-sleeved throng and, best of all, the certain knowledge that my thoroughly unbeaten team would surely prove unbeatable this year. (I’ll admit that in order to keep such simple-mindedness alive I’ve had to blind myself to some of the fine detail, but that hasn’t been too ...”

“... scholarly and readable. Wendy Hinde’s study is the more accessible and better-written, while Nicholas Edsall writes more incisively and with a wider understanding of Cobden’s political and social context. But both suffer from the problem that hampered their predecessors. It is easy as well as correct for a biographer to make Cobden seem an admirable ...”

“... one of the country’s oldest and most successful bands, which was founded in 1855. Like all the best bands, it’s based in Yorkshire. In many ways, it’s a model brass band: a small village group, originally associated with the local textile mill. The band embraces its ambassadorial role: its website describes its outreach and teaching efforts, and lists ...”