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“... Peter Prince’s admirable novel, The Good Father, is about a group of professional-class people in the London Borough of Lambeth, trying to see themselves as liberal and left-wing. They were students together in the late 1960s and are struggling to maintain in the 1980s the package of liberal values (or ‘received ideas’) which they shared so confidently in their youth ...”

“... and written in Wainwright’s evenings. He was Borough Treasurer of Kendal. His small house on the Green had one public room and here he worked while his wife and son, who had nowhere else to go, were made to sit in silence. No telephone, no television. Precious few friends. ‘There was never a single free evening when I didn’t apply myself to the task with ...”

“... Heaven and Hell’ excludes Leicester from heaven principally on the grounds of lust. After St Peter has interrogated him at length about his involvement in various murders, extortions and usurpations, he is almost persuaded by a show of repentance to admit him even so. St Peter threw open the gate and his Earlship most ...”

“... the dress is transcendent.’ Could dressing be about transcendence? Ida Hattemer-Higgins bought a green Yves Saint Laurent pencil skirt, a linen dress with a double Peter Pan collar, shirts in salmon, indigo and turmeric silk, a dove-grey swing jacket and a camel-mustard coat on a trip to Athens with the fiancé she’d ...”

“... islet is crammed with men: Chief Vorstenbosch, Deputy Melchior van Cleef, Dr Marinus, Senior Clerk Peter Fischer, Junior Clerk Ponke Ouwehand, Arie Grote, Piet Baert, Ivo Oost, Wybo Gerritszoon. Their conversation is as cacophonous as their names. For instance: ‘most of us hands gather of an evenin’ in my humble billet, eh, for a little hazard ...”

“... really, in this context, use the phrase ‘warm-up act’, but there he was in a loud shirt, Rob Green from Nottingham. He played a guitar and had enough spontaneous patter to upset the basic notion of the evening, that delightfulness, even in a live setting, can come in a posthumous form. ‘You won’t take me seriously,’ he sang, and I asked the ...”

“... Diaghilev ballet’. The influence of the Ballets Russes went much deeper than décor, however. As Peter Jacobs writes, it supplied a model of ‘a pagan liberty and a savage beauty, combined with a stylised severity or formal purity’, a liberty and a beauty embodied, one might add, in Nijinsky’s legs, to gaze on which Keynes briefly abandoned his Treatise ...”

“... Four possible candidates, varying in attainments, would be T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Peter Fleming (perhaps both Flemings) and Richard Hughes. It makes no difference that Lawrence was half-Irish, the Flemings mostly Scottish, and Hughes partly Welsh. The presidential or father figure of the group would be John Buchan, another Scot, whose innings ...”

“... as Vermischte Bermerkungen (Miscellaneous Remarks), now appears with facing English translation by Peter Winch. (The title Culture and Value will make Wittgenstein turn in his grave.) For those who see Wittgenstein as the creator of a great new direction in philosophy it may come as a shock to learn that he did not regard himself as an original thinker. In ...”

“... Lutyens, Giles Gilbert Scott, Charles Holden and lesser lights such as Edwin Cooper or W. Curtis Green. Practically every Georgian terrace they can find features in the book. They disapprove of the City’s ‘untidy and expanding cluster’ of skyscrapers, and are more pleased with the beaux-arts plan that defines the placing of skyscrapers around One ...”

“... crocodile who ate his arm and swallowed a clock. ‘That crocodile,’ Hook announces in Act II of Peter Pan, ‘would have had me before now, but … before he can reach me I hear the tick and bolt.’ ‘Some day,’ retorts the bespectacled boatswain Smee, ‘the clock will run down, and then he’ll get you.’ In the end, of course, time runs out for the ...”

“... no less true than the Cross.Poems of primary colours, and the liturgical and heraldic colours, green, gold, purple, yellow, black and red, illuminated by bright shafts under ‘the soiled grey blanket of Irish rain’. (The Bayeux tapestry is not the appropriate visual image for Muldoon: we should think rather of the Book of Kells.) On the other ...”

“... the architecture and gives an affectionate first-hand account of this monster of mendacity in his green old age. If he had not in some ways been the genius he said he was, his boastfulness would be intolerable. As it is, Gill makes you understand why clients who had buildings come in many times over budget and years over schedule, who found roofs leaked and ...”

“... prettiness has arrived. You would not have guessed it was on the way. In a picture from 1951 blue-green appears (coral reds and pale blue-greens were colours Chardin accented pictures with); and in a frieze-like arrangement including two bowls, from 1953-54, highlights suggest that a duster has got to work and a little more light is being allowed in. Over the ...”

“... and the space. Bonnard’s art delays this noticing and intensifies bliss. His colours – emerald-green, cobalt-blue, crimson-lake – keep their individuality. When he paints a bowl of fruit, a plum is a wonderful patch of purple black, a colour to be plucked in its own right and cherished in its relation to the yellow patch beside it, and at the same time ...”