“... catalogue of 1796, calls it Study of a Black Man’s Head, and the painting’s first owner, Sir George Beaumont, who had known both Johnson and Reynolds, asserted that it was a portrait of Reynolds’s black servant. There are a number of later copies or versions of the painting, one attributed to Reynolds’s pupil and amanuensis, James Northcote. These ...”

“... though this was eventually slimmed down to a canon of 52 poets from Abraham Cowley (1618-67) to George Lyttleton (1709-73). Johnson, by then 68 and the grand old man of English letters, was asked, for a modest fee of 200 guineas (‘no man but a blockhead’ etc), to add value and authority to the enterprise by providing a short preface to each poet’s ...”

“... George Osborne​ gets booed at the London Olympics. Suella Braverman cracks gags during her visit to a half-built asylum detention centre in Rwanda. Boris Johnson is illegally presented with a birthday cake. A Tory staffer throws up as the exit poll drops. David Cameron keeps his bladder full all night to achieve maximum focus during EU negotiations ...”

“... Perhaps this clotted rhetoric a long way after Hart Crane is no worse than the windy rhetoric of George Barker, but it is more alien to British readers, and reminds us of Jarrell’s remark that most poets, even good ones, write badly most of the time. But this selection from the poems is exemplary, presenting the case for Jarrell as a poet at his best the ...”

“... money will always elude whoever wants it most. A high, thin bottleneck sound rises up in ‘Cannon Ball Blues’, as if to escape the resignation of the song – and then as if it isn’t worth the effort. The back-and-forth tug of war on the piano in ‘Lo and Behold!’ is close to what Hutchison’s music is about: a tired, so-what refusal to wait around ...”

“... living in a city with an atmosphere of perpetual carnival. Caracole has epigraphs from George Eliot and Stendhal, and its tone is set by White’s ability to recreate the burnished prose of a more elegant age; at times it has the air of a classic novel translated from the French. L’amour, in White’s hands, is the subject both of fervid ...”

“... the budding Berlin towards Moscow – which Berlin finally reached in 1945/6. But whether Sir George Weidenfeld has had the right idea in resurrecting his despatches, I doubt. No person, no issue is concentrated upon in depth, and the footnotes provide witless and inaccurate help (Desert Victory was not a film about O’Connor’s 1940-41 offensive, and ...”

“... be a shot in the arm. To the Americans, resolving the fate of the MIAs is also a form of therapy. George Bush announced that the Vietnam Syndrome had been kicked after Operation Desert Storm, but as Christopher Hitchens noted here in August, controversy over draft-dodging in the Presidential election campaign indicates that it was merely in remission. The ...”

“... military service in The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991), and the narrator, who can’t catch a ball, feels a deepening of his discomfort among ‘these men who played rugby with ease’. (His friend and sort of lover dies in a firefight, but might as well have been – in the words of Forster’s famous description of Gerald’s death in The Longest ...”

“... the sparkle of his teacher Richard Wentworth’s playfulness (Hirst’s hairdryer and ping pong ball from 1994, called What Goes Up Must Come Down, has the punning neatness of Wentworth’s work). The English comedy of early Gilbert & George and a complicated mockery of class allegiance also lift the solemnity of ...”

“... Tóibín gives us a four-page ballad of Ebbets Field. There is no need, he suggests, for a ball game to signify everything. His game of baseball is not a Cold War allegory. It doesn’t purport to teach us that ‘everything is connected’. It’s a game of baseball. By not forcing its significance, Tóibín lets that significance emerge. The ...”

“... medievalist who saw the ‘life of forms’ as an almost autonomous force in art, and the American George Kubler, an expert in pre-Columbian artefacts for whom the Panofskyan emphasis on individual style, strict chronology and iconographic analysis (the hunting for sources of images in documents) was not helpful in a field where known artists, exact dates and ...”

“... on Burra is that he took his cue from Continental graphic artists: Caran d’Ache, for one, and George Grosz obviously. But even when he was producing the sort of stuff now classified by the dealers as Art Deco, his traits, ghoulish yet lyrical in tone and atmosphere, evoke de la Mare. A screech across the sands! That sullen Thump! Oh, wicked Mr Punch ...”

“... detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison. The Brides in the Bath murderer George Smith and John Christie of Rillington Place fitted the bill, while the Kray Brothers became tabloid proto-celebrities even as they were ordering gangland rivals to be shot or hacked to death. But there were limits, and in 1966 the horrors that came out ...”

“... She had an (illegal) abortion, aged eighteen, after her domestic employer got her pregnant. Dr George Clinton Jeffrey and Dr Crippen, his new assistant, recently arrived from Salt Lake City, carried it out. After a detailed sketch of the German immigrant community in Brooklyn (beer halls, German-language theatres, singing societies), Rubenhold forces us to ...”