“... boy, the source of the blood for the conspirators’ monstrous oath, but he allows the intrigue to peter out by page 62 for the sake of more cardboard callousness, as the boy’s owner chucklingly confesses: ‘I was sickened … That lad cost me thousands.’ Harris’s Cicero trilogy is a long way from being any kind of literary masterpiece, but I am pretty ...”

“... what the essayist principally intended. By contrast, when Philip Larkin reviews in 1959 Iona and Peter Opie’s Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, one is distracted from the just and necessary points that Larkin has to make, by the elaboration or further definition of the Larkin persona as ‘a man who hates children’ (who by that token, as W.C. Fields ...”

“... No one can have been more surprised than James Fenton that In Memory of War turned out to be one of the most acclaimed books of 1982. A year ago, used to being told by reviewers that he was a ‘difficult’, even ‘esoteric’ poet, it looked as if he had decided that small publishers and little magazines were the most appropriate place for his work ...”

“... victim. The investigators in question are damaged, a common feature of Dexter’s characters. Jack James, the narrator, is almost as screwed up as his brother Ward, the titular ‘paperboy’, star reporter on the Miami Times. Jack self-destructs in his first year at the University of Florida, returning in shame to the narcotic routines of his father’s home ...”

“... spoke to anybody, the shop was privately run so you couldn’t afford to shop here anyway.’ Peter Harris, another volunteer, was one of the first to move in, from his native Fakenham, in 2008. His career as a road engineer had been cut short when he slipped while carrying a 75kg kerbstone and badly injured his back. He hasn’t worked since. The ...”

“... Labour. But by that autumn the IMF had caught up with the Wilson Government, now presided over by James Callaghan. The next year, the unions declared once more for free collective bargaining and last year the pay policy was repudiated. The Government tried once more to govern without the consent of the trade unions. Once more it failed. It was the Scots who ...”

“... smallest police station (a plinth in Trafalgar Square), its first Greek Revival building (James Stuart’s Doric temple of 1758 at Hagley Park) and Temple Bar (in its present situation in a Hertfordshire wood) are all follies by Headley’s and Meulencamp’s definition. The first, like many of their eye-catchers and shams, is not quite what it ...”

“... After that new organists often got one immediately. The pattern at the abbey was very similar: James Turle was the last of the old type, having been organist there for 51 years, starting in 1831, without official acknowledgment. His successor, Frederick Bridge, was knighted in 1897. Again, every subsequent organist was so recognised until the run ended ...”

“... Van Dyck did not settle in England in 1621. Blake’s picture of the sleazy English court during James I’s last years (did the King make a pass at Van Dyck? he wonders) and the suggestion that the Vangoose mocked by Jonson in his Masque of Augurs was a jibe at Van Dyck, makes plausible his suggestion that Van Dyck went back to Antwerp because he found ...”

“... images and exhausted subjects; from Glen Ligon’s black on black painting of a paragraph from a James Baldwin essay to Chohreh Feyzdjou’s smearing of black pigment on jars and boxes that contain the scrolled text of her autobiography. As Enwezor envisaged, many ‘new relations of spectatorship’ were introduced, relations which drew on the tragic and ...”

“... Not long ago, James Wolcott wrote an article for the New Yorker lamenting the ‘softened, juvenilised’, timbre of modern female journalism. In the old days, he said, women like Germaine Greer and Valerie Solanas made men nervous. They produced feisty, aggressive prose. They were rude and polemical. They wrote, in Norman Mailer’s words, like ‘very tough faggots ...”

“... open over a secret courtyard, and I could hear what sounded like an old TV broadcast, the voice of Peter Jennings saying it was a historic moment. I wasn’t imagining it: the sound was coming from the Brandenburg Gate, where images from the fall of the Wall were being projected onto the façade to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of reunification.Fresh ...”

“... and democratic vulgarity. J.R. Ackerley’s world was in its own way not so different. Peter Parker has already written a searching book, The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos, and his long and thorough account of Ackerley’s career is even better, still more revealing. Ackerley’s odd provenance, well-known from his own book, My ...”

“... appalled by the touch of a female. After a brisk march through the history of sainthood – from Peter and Paul to the Reformation in just ninety pages – Bartlett turns to a leisured exploration of liturgical commemoration, relics and shrines, pilgrimage, church dedications, personal and place names, images of the saints and literary genres, including ...”

“... to signify humanity’s blasting off into the unknown he is obviously deaf to its echo of Peter Pan’s mawkish assertion that ‘to die will be an awfully big adventure.’ It is also fine to throw out phrases like ‘we will soon be able to cross the gaps between stars’; but who is this ‘we’, and why the implied immediacy, even urgency, of all ...”