“... of the Ireland Shakespeare forgeries, soon dispelled by Edmond Malone. (A pity Malone never took up Defoe as an object of study.) Of the next biographer, the authors simply say that Walter Wilson’s ‘claims to critical skill are really very modest’, an understatement on the grand scale. It is revealed of W.P. Trent, the most influential figure in ...”

“... was largely a third Bill Clinton term: Rahm Emanuel, Lawrence Summers, Tom Donilon, Leon Panetta, John Podesta and Hillary Clinton were called back and held over. The interlude of subsequent personal enrichment by Clinton, trading on her prestige and inside knowledge, has drawn attention in recent days, after the revelation of her large speaking fees on Wall ...”

“... wrongful conviction for sexual assault, Avery went back to jail. In ten hours of television that took almost ten years to produce, Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi minutely reconstruct the investigation of Halbach’s death. In particular, their series explores the possibility that the police framed Steven Avery for the killing and obtained a false confession ...”

“... comes only, in Salome, with death. The Climax shows Salome holding up the severed head of John the Baptist to look him in the eyes, beside the lines: ‘J’ai baisé ta bouche Iokanaan/J’ai baisé ta bouche.’ Below and between the two a phallic lily rises. The Art Journal found Beardsley’s work upsetting, ‘terrible in its weirdness’, full ...”

“... he was always a storyteller for boys, in the tradition (a very good one) of R.L. Stevenson and John Buchan. In A Sort of Life, which was as near to an autobiography as he was ever prepared to go (and itself the result of psychotherapy for a period of writer’ block), Greene tells how he first came to keep a record of his dreams. Though it’ not at all ...”

“... We started reading Emma soon after the sirens took over our evenings and sometimes our nights. Their expectation was worse than their whine and from the first waning of the winter light in the late afternoon you found yourself nervously gobbling chocolate or peanuts or anything just to fill that pulsating, dark hole where your stomach used to be ...”

“... which his talents were quite futile. Listen to Callaghan himself, describing his feelings as he took office as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1964, after Labour had won an election in peacetime conditions, when no one was out of work: ‘In all the offices I have held I have never experienced anything more frustrating than sitting at the Chancellor’s desk ...”

“... the novels of Dickens and Eliot. (It was only later that Zola would join his personal canon.) He took from the great Victorian novelists that his was an age that pushed individuals into small dark corners, insignificant socially but emotionally huge, and that to illuminate these local recesses was to begin the crucial task of compassion and ...”

“... intended for the Royal Academy – is made clear by the trouble and expense Payne Knight took to include works by (or supposedly by) Michelangelo. These were not to his taste, but he recognised their importance. The exhibition includes The Holy Family with the Infant St John, the first drawing by Michelangelo to ...”

“... for Christ to be tied to, it is without fluting. A rusticated arch in the late Beheading of St John and the manger in a Nativity are unclear. Clouds supporting angels and broad swathes of drapery may make strong patterns against these backgrounds, but even the angels seem to be contained in the same shallow space as the other figures.Photographers and ...”

“... Scott sentimentality to summon, with bicycle imagery, projections of an England that never was. John Major, a gap-year, work experience prime minister, sleepwalking through the job, as a profile-raising photo opportunity between serious employment in the banking and conference-addressing industries, blundered into a reprise of Orwell’s cycling ...”

“... as a bit too cuddly and open, and makes you long for the days of secrecy and high adventure before John Major passed the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, which not only publicly acknowledged the existence of SIS for the first time, to absolutely no one’s surprise, but also made it subject to Parliamentary oversight. Or it may be that it strikes you as a load ...”

“... Britain’s input was increasingly marginal, especially when in the later stages the Pentagon took over from the State Department, the FCO’s main interlocutor. British officials recommended that there should be no dismantling of Iraq’s governmental and security structures and had not expected that the US would disband the Iraqi army and dismiss ...”

“... many or most of us nurse comparable sensitivities to those of the young man whose words Martin took from an internet discussion of synaesthesia. (Mine are vegetal too: I have a thing about rhubarb leaves, not to speak of certain stalky umbellifers – cow parsley and the like. I blame the memory of frilled and succulent Triffids in a television adaptation ...”

“... who showed themselves to be the intellectual heirs of the didactic Victorian tradition. John Berger, in the New Statesman, complained that the show demonstrated that ‘industrial capitalism has now destroyed the standards of Popular Taste and substituted for them standards of gentility, Bogus-Originality and competitive cultural ...”