“... and a rosary each. The list of stars in the film (Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Edward Norton, all the others mentioned elsewhere in this piece) is a clue to what we are watching. They are all themselves, bringing with them the clouds of movies they have been in. They have come to the party. This effect is largely kept up by the dialogue, which is ...”

“... what amounted to pocket money. (He did better in this respect than the feeble-minded Mr Dick of David Copperfield, who is supplied with pocket money but not allowed to spend it.) Not long after becoming third earl, he fled from home for a brief period in the company of his Swiss valet, though whether this was an abduction or an elopement is hard to say. The ...”

“... Park Honan has done one of the two already, and now has done the other. Coming shortly after David Riggs’s solid, even too-solid The World of Christopher Marlowe, his Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy feels a little lightweight. He is probably right to say that he has a better story about Marlowe’s origins in Canterbury and his doings at Corpus in ...”

“... were those of the now dead – along with a photo of a British coffin being unloaded at RAF Brize Norton. The Times’s running headnote, ‘A Nation at War’, echoed ‘A Nation under Attack’, which ran in the days after 9/11. In between was the eerie iconographic emptiness of Afghanistan, now largely forgotten. The war has been about the control of ...”

“... This​ is a dry and dutiful book which reads like a ghost story. The person being haunted is David Cameron. Theresa May grew up in a Cotswolds village called Church Enstone, where her father was vicar for much of the 1960s. The vicarage is within five miles of what became Cameron’s constituency home when he was MP for Witney and is roughly the same distance from what is now Soho Farmhouse, a members’ club, a little piece of the metropolis that is a haven for the Chipping Norton set ...”

“... perspectives represented by Henry Fielding. Henry’s sister Sarah, whose novel The Adventures of David Simple is examined in detail here, demonstrates the power of the vision of sensibility which culminated in Richardson’s Clarissa. It was a double-edged rule, bound up with the perverse gratifications of misery. Virtue could be revered only as long as it ...”

“... page. It reads as if made from a dead language.’It was McGuinness who, in collaboration with David Pears, produced the second English translation, in 1961. But the correspondence with Ogden, in which Wittgenstein commented on the first draft of the first translation, had not yet come to light (it was published only in 1973), so there was little ...”

“... David Foster Wallace’s parents, Sally and Jim, were the sort of couple who read each other Ulysses in bed while holding hands. Jim read David and his younger sister Amy Moby-Dick as a bedtime story. It wasn’t inevitable that the boy would grow up to write an epic novel, but it wasn’t accidental ...”

“... the effects of exposure and altitude demand either strong climbing instincts or what Colonel Norton, the leader of the 1924 expedition who got within 1000ft of the summit without oxygen, described as ‘PBS – pure, bloody sweat’. So what of the case for Mallory and Irvine having made it to the top? Before last year, this was unproven (but by no means ...”

“... he was 45 and she was 25. Cavendish was the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, a cousin of Lord David Cecil, et cetera, and became a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret – the next best thing, perhaps, to Betjeman bagging a royal. His relationship with Cavendish was clearly one of the most important in his life, but the reader is left to infer from ...”

“... modelled on Bowen’s Court. Summer season guests come and go. Among them is the forceful Marda Norton, in whom Lois eagerly confides. ‘I like to be related; to have to be what I am,’ Lois explains. ‘Just to be is so intransitive, so lonely.’ To become transitive is what Bowen’s protagonists most want. Marda reckons that Lois will enjoy marriage ...”

“... had ‘already given wide currency to not fewer than 125 separate texts’. Another referee, David Masson, wrote that, ‘by his own unaided exertions’, Arber had ‘accomplished labours of editing and reprinting, such as might have tasked the united efforts of several Publishing Societies’. A surprising number of minor works are still only easily ...”

“... welcome. But the hero’s welcome was missing. The walking wounded were greeted at RAF Brize Norton by their families, the press and TV cameras: but the more seriously injured, the badly burned and maimed, were kept out of sight – even their families were not permitted to see them until they were safely out of camera range in the RAF hospital at ...”

“... editions of Mrs Dalloway – such as Anne Fernald’s for Cambridge or Merve Emre’s for Norton in 2021 – draw attention at this juncture to an incident recorded in Woolf’s diary on 9 January 1915. She and Leonard had decided to walk along the Thames from Richmond to Kingston. The entry consists for the most part of a low-key description of a few ...”

“... section of Tenured Radicals to the de Man affair, as an academic cover-up of Watergate dimensions. David Lehman’s Signs of the Times – reviewed here not long ago by Claude Rawson – is a narrative and meditation on the same subject. The tone is less enjoyably sarcastic than Kimball’s, but Lehman too is convinced that the de Man case is symptomatic of a ...”