“... here of Titian’s friend and public-relations manager, Pietro Aretino, and his greatest patron, King Philip of Spain, are rich in revealing detail and seem, by contrast, fully rounded. No reliable record survives of the way Titian conducted himself in the company of friends, let alone in private. The Ferrarese ambassador in 1522 claims that the artist is ...”

“... If Pope’s Dunciad, Johnson’s ‘London’, Blake’s Songs of Experience and Shelley’s ‘Peter Bell’ are set before it. Thomson takes his place in a tradition linking the Augustans and Romantics with the Moderns: a metropolitan tradition reflecting the state of Britain. This was not noticed because Tennyson, Browning and Arnold provided a greater ...”

“... was still hot’ is the wonderfully happy last line of Wild Things, when, after years of rumpus as King of the Wild Things far away, Max finds his supper waiting in his room. But illustrating the Grimm story Dear Mili, discovered in 1983, Sendak offers little comfort. An unpleasant epitome of the genre, and especially of Wilhelm Grimm’s morbid taste, Dear ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s new novel is partly a narrative, partly a series of rhapsodies and meditations on the nature of English culture, written in the styles of various great authors. It is an important and a depressing book, its importance more or less in direct proportion to the depth of the gloom it sheds. With luck we may one day look back on it as the last ‘English’ novel ...”

“... In the middle of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, for example, we declined to publish an interview with King Hussein that had been obtained with great difficulty in favour of a diary from a reporter who lost his nerve and spent several days – or maybe it was just hours – cowering in his hotel bathroom. That was the sort of thing the high-ups didn’t ...”

“... a Lutheran court poet such as Clément Marot, from persecutions approved of by her beloved brother King Francis I. Why did Erasmus, despite it all, not break with Rome? Who was it who enabled the great Greek scholar Guillaume Budé to reconcile St Paul’s likening of humans in the hands of God to pots in a potter’s hand, some of which were predestined to ...”

“... Tory MPs like Julian Amery (originally seen helping Zog in Albania), Winston Churchill and Peter Temple-Morris deliver themselves of staggeringly banal pronouncements. In spite of some of them going on ‘fact-finding’ missions to the Middle East, they are as ill-informed and full of poor advice on their return as they were before. Even worse, when ...”

“... the rhythms of thought and breaking the natural phrase as if breaking a surface. Her translator, Peter Graves, more than rises to the challenge this presents. He has found a register in English – both offhand and choral – that brings the voices together without letting them merge. The result is that these eight hundred sparse pages offer as much as a ...”

“... for ‘falling’ read ‘fading’; for ‘The plains’, ‘These plains’. In Fast Forward, Peter Porter meditates persistently on the decline of Classical culture and the threat of nuclear war. What comes of the used-up Mediterranean When rockets point like pines in tundra Towards the profaned moon? he asks in ‘Cyprus, Aeschylus, Inanition’. The ...”

“... attacks her failure to set up an inquiry into the behaviour of security officers who, according to Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, sought to undermine the Wilson premiership. These charges, as Mr Dalyell frames them, have either been denied or brushed aside by Mrs Thatcher or her spokesmen. The evidence on offer is sometimes thin. A not-proven verdict would seem ...”

“... questioned Stalker’s treatment, weighed in with another programme (by the same reporter, Peter Taylor) which had a very definite anti-Stalker bias. A prisoner called William McPhee gave a statement to the Guardian saying he had been approached in prison by two police officers (one with strong RUC connections) and offered lenient treatment if would ...”

“... Colin and Frankie, whose mothers are cousins, used to play together as little children. Tony was king of the classroom at secondary school, and Frankie became his friend the same day he acquired his nickname, Frankie the Fib. The episode in question is designed to illustrate Tony’s psychological strength, and his cruelty. The boys have a religious studies ...”

“... of a horse race.) According to the director’s own amused voiceover, a young seahorse resembles a King Charles spaniel. Fully grown, it’s a puffed-up and pompous individual, fretfully anthropoid, given to pouting and anxiously darting its eyes. Like the sea snail, this animal is ambiguously sexed: the female inserts her eggs in the male’s belly, and he ...”

“... being physically part of an audience, the more essential distances are decently maintained). Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria built a private playhouse so that he could watch Wagner’s operas quite alone; today, every owner of a television set enjoys a similar privilege. Indeed, one’s privilege is greater, for though the paranoid Ludwig could isolate himself ...”

“... humble/devoted/faithful servant’ – these terms are fossils of what the historian Peter Laslett called ‘the world we have lost’, a world in which virtually all social relations, no matter how intimate, were defined by the language and ideology of service.To sense how this was so, we have only to look at the literature of the early modern ...”