“... they were so much cleverer than the Romans, but they never told the Romans this.’ (That is in Peter Clarke’s book.) He won’t have been serious; but the levity of the remark suggests that the fall of the empire wasn’t upsetting him too much. The inevitability of the end of empire was accepted mainly because it was so blindingly obvious to all save ...”

“... this fairyland, until, egged on by his mother, he stole a golden ball that belonged to the fairy king. On his way home he was tripped up by a couple of fairies, who took the ball and vanished. Elidyr was never again able to find his way into fairyland, but in later life he was quizzed by the bishop of St David’s about his experiences and claimed to be able ...”

“... were aware that others weren’t so fortunate. During trips to London, Michael and his brother, Peter, helped serve food in East End soup kitchens and were taken along to suffragist meetings. Tippett attended his first orchestral concert at this time: Henry Wood conducting music by Tchaikovsky at the Queen’s Hall. When the Great War began, the Hôtel ...”

“... 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 ...”