“... A new year​ ! A new you! This is supposed to be the time for self-improvement, which makes me wonder what’s gone wrong for 2015. We’re used to the newspaper supplements’ December/January yadda-yadda of diets and get-fit-quick schemes, to the cultural roundups of the year ahead. The steady increase in all this stuff – the annual binge – is one of the more reliable indicators of the passing of the years, and so it will continue until the demise of print ...”

“... many additions, subtractions, multiplications, and divisions are detailed in a wonderful new book by Vivien Igoe, The Real People of Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (University College Dublin Press, £32), but let’s first pay a visit to The People v. O.J. Simpson, a show that reminded me – as if I needed reminding – that real life is the poor, lost cousin of ...”

“... interestingly, she was also evoking a whole school of New York writers, for whom Mankiewicz could be made to stand representative: a set of wisecracking, worldly figures supposedly attracted to Hollywood by the prospect of copious easy money, who created not a genre of film, but rather a style that prepared the way for ...”

“... The song​  we hear at the beginning of David Leitch’s film Bullet Train is the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’. It’s a good song and all too relevant, but by the time the movie’s plot gets rolling it sounds more like a fragile wish than any sort of programme. ‘Fate is a name for my bad luck,’ a leading character says ...”

“... isn’t so much a near-miss prophecy as a piece of lugubrious theatre, playing with what used to be called mentalism. This is the territory of Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, as it was of Edmund Goulding’s 1947 movie of the same name and the 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham on which both are based: a place ...”

“... where they cry out for a collected edition. When such an edition appears, they cannot fail to be recognised as a masterpiece of Scottish literature. I came, while engaged in writing a book about Cockburn, to love his letters, and I have even managed to love those which turned up too late for consideration in the book. A further letter has now arrived in ...”

“... a rather sombre double, a Catholic moralist who is patient rather than amused, it can confidently be said that Small World is the most brilliant and also the funniest he has written. It is, of course, a campus novel, but the campus has been globalised. Lodge avers, through Zapp, that the big-time academics have now no need of a local habitation: they spend ...”

“... The vast David Hockney show at the Royal Academy (until 9 April) is deliberately overwhelming. What it most looks like is an overblown, hyped-up, hyperreal parody of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, that super-English annual gathering of the amateur art establishment, to which the buying public with large pocketbooks flock from the Home Counties and beyond ...”

“... another combine harvester, labouring up and down another field, diagonally, this time accompanied by a blue tractor. This pairing of views in Patrick Keiller’s 2010 film Robinson in Ruins – glimpsed again as part of his current installation at Tate Britain (on display until 14 October) – is almost too typical to ...”

“... on Fifth Avenue in 1955 finds a lens in her face. People are not yet afraid of being photographed by strangers in the street; still, she leans away to her right, averts her gaze from the man’s impertinent Leica. Or so it seems: it’s hard to tell where she’s looking – she’s quite a blur, and her big dark eyes are further shadowed ...”

“... made a Royal Academician in 2005 but he has remained a quiet man of British art in comparison with David Hockney or R.B. Kitaj, his contemporaries at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s. ‘Swan i’ (1964) The exhibition shows how decisively he transcends the well-worn term ‘postwar British artist’: Bowling is diasporic, resisting easy ...”

“... or swanky golfing parties in Shanghai hotels. It was the title of a dance festival, compered by People’s Liberation Army choreographers, ‘offered’ to the Communist Party in celebration of its 80th anniversary in 2001. It would be too easy to see this exhibition, which has obtained from the Palace Museum in ...”

“... uranium fuel for those reactors will initially come from Russia, but Iran says it wishes to be self-reliant for its supply of fuel. Since 1985, Iran has been developing its own enrichment capability, importing centrifuge designs and components from Pakistan. Uranium centrifuges have a dual purpose: they can produce low-enriched (2 to 3 per cent) uranium ...”

“... reason Tito lived so long in his last illness was that no one in the Presidential Council dared be the first to suggest that the various life-supporting machines should be switched off. Maybe in the end someone dared. Or maybe Tito, whose body in life had done so much to reconcile the politically irreconcilable in ...”

“... about 90 per cent of women, were illiterate. Proportions varied from region to region. In London by the end of the 17th century illiteracy may have been down to two-thirds or a quarter; for women about a half. There were fluctuations over time: a rapid growth in literacy immediately after the Henrician Reformation and again in the early years of ...”