“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... front.) The magazine campaigned for the end of Israeli military rule, which with the support of David Ben-Gurion and his party Mapai (later the Labour Party), lasted for 18 years until 1966; it reported on Israeli military actions against Palestinian civilians, including the Qibya massacre in 1953 and the Kfar Qassem massacre in 1956; it published stories ...”

“... on the girl’s skirt and the stripes on the boy’s jacket are frantically busy; the figures may be fixed, doll-like, but things whirl chaotically, noisily around them. There’s prettiness, domesticity and decoration in Cooke’s work, but at the same time an interest in abstraction. She could be masterful in her use of space and colour to create and ...”

“... to Hades – a detail I learned not from Briggs’s notes, but from an account of the poem by David Trotter.No doubt conscious of the fact that Paris has been reissued several times and failed to gain a wider readership, the new edition arrives with reinforcements. The Briggs commentary comes in at about three times the length of the poem ...”

“... liquid bottle (‘cleans, no added promises’) on a fire. Words rear up and loom enormous – David Cameron, for example, may find this with his plan for ‘thrifty government’ – and fizz and collapse and make a nasty smell. It is, I take it, obvious that one of the many things no one particularly needs at the ...”