“... power of the raped and dying woman’. So the work is not as tightly composed as Donaldson may wish it to be – although this is not the defect he may fear it is. The parts of the book are unequal, since Lucretia has all the thunder (St ...”

“... I “know” that I have lost something irrecoverable.’ This is an outrageous story: but one may admire it for that, for its mischievous invention, and for its limited awareness of such gestures and proportions as a baby might truly have observed. It brings to mind what Roth said about his revered Heine: ‘Maybe he did make up the odd fact, but then he ...”

“... supposed ‘goals’ of the Communist Party Historians Group in 1946-56, the realisation of which may be seen in A.L. Morton’s The World of the Ranters and Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down. At the same time, these and other historians wished to find precursors for the anti-hegemonic ‘hippy’ culture of the late 1960s, and Norman Cohn ...”

“... more mysterious. They have been the subject of two previous books, by Mollie Gillen (1972) and David Hanrahan (2008), both called The Assassination of the Prime Minister. Linklater doesn’t add much information or evidence about the event itself, but he puts it in context, and provides fascinating if overblown speculations about the supposed ...”

“... already written ‘a compendium of Universal History’ at the age of eight.) One of his reasons may have been to escape from the traumas, as he saw them, of family life. The past was all done, finished, secure; it couldn’t let him down like his mother and siblings had. ‘In the dead there is no change.’ And it couldn’t answer back. (Surely there are ...”

“... by high tariffs from global competition. The European Union has been good to farmers. This may now be coming to an end, for Britain may be about to leave. In 1973, when Britain entered the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the EU, everyone older than their early twenties could remember food ...”

“... which was deplored even at the time of the centenary of publication 38 years ago, when Elizabeth David pointed out that the currently available Mrs Beeton didn’t contain a single recipe from the original. That this is an odd state of affairs does not of itself make a facsimile of the 1861 book an interesting object. People buy and use the modern Mrs Beeton ...”

“... opponent was saying exhibited the profound conviction of his own beliefs. Did not the poet King David say: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward and put to confusion, that desire my hurt’? Individualism, bordering on eccentricity, even to the extent of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’, has ...”

“... too. Here he is, for example, talking about Coleman Silk (the protagonist of The Human Stain) to David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, in a TV interview filmed in 2003: He wants to separate himself from the predicament into which he was born. Not the first person to want to do that. You needn’t be black to want to do that. You needn’t be Jewish ...”

“... are all possibilities. The only known reader of the new work is Salinger’s son, Matthew, but he may have been joined by Salinger’s widow, Colleen, and possibly by his literary agent and by a few editors at Little, Brown, the publisher of the original four books. Or maybe not; maybe at this stage it stops with the widow and the son, or even just the ...”

“... not nearly as good a critic as he evidently thinks he is. Compare his essay on Edward Thomas with David Bromwich’s in a recent Raritan, and you’ll see the academic critic is far better. In scholarship, on the rare occasions on which it arises, Grigson is irresponsible. In The Private Art he says that ‘years ago someone spotted that in another of ...”

“... steel make such concerted use of the brilliant light effects inherent in its surface. Only David Smith has pursued them as diligently as Ray. The two men share a commitment to contingency as well as a medium: not just steel (itself an alloy of iron), but stainless steel in particular, another alloy, first produced in the early 20th century by adding ...”

“... on display at the National Gallery’s small exhibition of his paintings (until 19 May), was previously catalogued as The Friends and Two Sisters, kidding absolutely nobody. These early works, heavy in innuendo and set in fashionable interiors, are far removed from the crowded Parisian street scenes that later became his stock in ...”

“... tale. Putting careers and heartaches to one side, it is true that the anatomy of failure may be more culturally informative than the naming of triumphs. It must be rather shocking for Shyamalan, but his latest movie, The Happening, is one of the most interesting movies of the year, despite being one of the worst. It offers a study in what happens to ...”

“... for a while as live-in curators. In 1970 a new modernist extension was added, by Leslie Martin and David Owers, to show off more of the work in a larger space with more generous sofas. The latest development – funded by £3.65 million from Arts Council England and £2.32 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund – has involved entirely remodelling and ...”