“... into the alliums, so many of them that the poor plants are bowed under their weight. 30 April-1 May. To Essential Music in Great Chapel Street to record The Uncommon Reader, which Gordon House, former head of drama at BBC Radio, has adapted and is producing. What other readers are like I’ve no idea, but I always feel I am a sound editor’s ...”

“... worse; if we go on as we are, the scientists warned, our planet’s near-to-medium-term outlook may well be grim. Cape Grim, aptly named in 1798 by its British discoverer, Matthew Flinders RN, is a 3o0-foot sandstone spike projecting into the Southern Ocean on the wind-whipped western coast of Tasmania. Here nine weather scientists reporting to the IPCC ...”

“... a drawing of myself (‘Cheers!’). The temporarily denominated pub is called the Crossed Pipes.4 May. A review by Elaine Showalter of a biography of the photographer Richard Avedon in which I am mentioned as one of his sitters. Sitting it was too, and in acute discomfort, as Avedon chose to pose me perched on the branch of a tree in Hyde Park, one leg on ...”

“... and French painting (meaning the line from Corot to Matisse, from Sardanapalus to Ma Jolie) may be seen as events of equal weight. Both, taken as a whole – the simple fact of them, their coming into being, their import, their purpose – are mysteries. Both speak to a fundamental change in the conditions of representation in the cultures that gave ...”

“... the staff association for England and Wales, told the BBC in 2014, shortly after Theresa May, the then home secretary, laid into the organisation at its annual conference (the police aren’t allowed to have a union and have been banned from striking since 1919). ‘We were the favoured group, always looked on by government as the people who did ...”

“... monism. Since Nehamas is arguing for the coherence of Nietzsche’s writings, the intention may be to evince the final triumph of critical monism. But since the book also defends Nietzsche’s perspectivism, the view denying that we can aspire to anything more than one among many possible perspectives, I shall contend here that it leaves behind the ...”

“... river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover.’ This Churchillian passage may be among his current regrets. Naipaul spent the Eighties in hygienic Wiltshire, and at the end of the decade he was knighted for his services to literature. At this point he went once more to India, and has now published a third book, which ...”

“... the Roman conquerors will relax their vigilance, so enabling her to proceed with her suicide. It may be that Barton has decided, with New Critical severity, that Plutarch is one thing and the play another, that the subtle deception in the Greek account is simply absent from the drama – but can we be sure of this? At IV.xv.25, 49 Cleopatra told the dying ...”

“... Michel Foucault, for once and for now, may stand aside: who is the Raymond Roussel about whom he wrote this, his one real essay into literature? Roussel was a writer, of sorts, of the early 20th century; a man both glamorously rich and mentally odd. His money he spent to the hilt in the furtherance of his oddness, for Roussel laboured to write the most uncommercial works and then paid to have them published ...”

“... imagery could doubtless be tested statistically; more usefully, writers with a visual handicap may be stimulated to stretch the connotations of words. Trevor-Roper quotes Tennyson’s ‘the wrinkled sea beneath him crawls’ as an example of short-sighted imagery, and the translation by the blind poet W.H. Coates of a stanza from Shelley’s Prometheus ...”

“... in nine years, falling from 2.2 births per woman in 1987 to 1.3 in 1996. A demographer somewhere may prove me wrong, but I believe this to be the fastest collapse in peacetime fertility in recorded history (less rapid, but still dramatic falls have been taking place in other states of the former Soviet Union). John Lloyd intends no irony in his title, but ...”

“... right hand, the triumphalist tone returns in the final pages of The American Century: Reagan may have presided over the largest peacetime expansion of the military budget in American history and then imagined that the Soviets and Americans could unite behind his Star Wars Strategic Defence Initiative ‘to repel invaders of Earth from other ...”

“... admirable translation. This is mainly due to a very French preoccupation with abstractions which may leave the pragmatic English reader gasping for air. The fact that the work is in two parts, of which the first – written later – presents the conclusions for which the second part provides the basis, does not help. It is probably rather easier to grasp if ...”

“... is notably inferior), is perhaps his most successful poem, though this somewhat recherché genre may be caviar to the general. (Indeed, if one defines the genre strictly, as Priscilla Bawcutt has suggested – ‘a literary game, in which the competitors vie in verbal and metrical ingenuity ... a kind of sportive warfare’ – the only other example of it ...”

“... by establishing a similar parliament and government in the South was an abysmal failure. Opinion may also have been affected by the fact that the opening of this Northern Parliament was the occasion for a speech by King George V, owing much to his personal initiative and offering an olive branch to the Irish Nationalist tradition that quickly led to a ...”