“... My English teacher used to disparage Caroline Spurgeon. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us was too systematic for the honest amateur with dottle in his ashtray, the sort who took his pupils through Antony and Cleopatra in the morning and watched from his shooting stick as they toiled at sports in the afternoon. Still, you can make a case for treating Shakespeare as a force of nature and going about the plays as a natural scientist would, by instance and inventory ...”

“... Last month’s release of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks raised some eyebrows in France. Le Monde, one of the selected press outlets in the latest syndication, posed as the honest, bustling broker, in the manner of the Guardian. But Le Figaro (right of centre) got on its high horse to denounce the leaks and even Libération (left of centre) saddled up the donkey ...”

“... Three years or so​ before his death, Richard Diebenkorn illustrated an elegant volume of Yeats’s poems from Arion Press in San Francisco, introduced by Helen Vendler. Vendler had already done an edition of Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ for Arion, printed on roundel pages – wheels of paper 18” in diameter – with work by several artists, including Willem de Kooning and Jim Dine, as well as a selection of Wallace Stevens with a frontispiece by Jasper Johns; 1992 saw an edition of Kaddish, White Shroud and Black Shroud with lithograph portraits by Kitaj ...”

“... Valérie Trierweiler​ ’s book about her life as a grande Hollandaise and France’s first lady, and then – abruptly – neither of those, is more hair-raising than the extracts in Paris Match suggested when they appeared on the eve of publication at the beginning of September. Her pain levels are out of control; rage, jealousy, self-pity, self-flattery and malice are the indices, on every page ...”

“... There are plenty of reasons for parents to push their children about, or rally them when they seem to slump. But it’s important to listen to them too, unless they’re rehearsing the plot of a movie that’s just sent the nanny into a coma on the beanbag. Listening is one of the many things that Pamela Druckerman feels French parents get right. The source of this success, she tells us in French Children Don’t Throw Food (Doubleday, £15), is Françoise Dolto, one of the major figures of French parenting theory (the other, Druckerman says, is Rousseau ...”

“... We are fighting a losing battle,’ Philip Hensher writes in The Missing Ink, his funny, exasperated book in defence of handwriting.* He has no difficulty spotting the enemy. Consider the advice from the Indiana Department of Education last year that only proficiency with a keyboard would be expected of pupils in its charge. (Schools ‘can continue to teach handwriting if they want ...”

“... It’s hard to think of a culture that doesn’t keep an eye on the weather, yet we imagine it to be a thoroughly British habit. The painters are among the best observers, and Turner the grandest. Shortly before he died he was discovered on the floor of his sickroom in Cheyne Walk, having tried to reach the window and a view of the Thames. His doctor recalled how ‘the sun broke through the cloudy curtain which for so long had obscured its splendour, and filled the chamber of death with a glory of light ...”

“... How you punish a thief, in Plato, depends on the nature of the theft – and always on the status of the thief. The thing that’s stolen is also an issue. In the Laws a slave who steals ‘an object of no great value’ should be soundly beaten. But if a free man steals the same object, he should repay the owner ten times its value. What’s ten times ‘no great value’? Remove the ‘great’ and you arrive at zero ...”

“... Remembrance Sunday this year was a good one for the Shot at Dawn campaigners. Since 1990 they have sought pardons for more than three hundred servicemen executed during World War One for ‘military offences’: desertion, cowardice and disobedience. The pardons, announced by the MoD in August, were largely the result of growing press coverage, discreet encouragement from the Irish government and the fact that the case of Private Harry Farr, shot in 1916 for cowardice, was due to return to the High Court, with a reasonable chance of success for his descendants – including his daughter, who’s now in her nineties ...”

“... When Barbara Castle told Harold Wilson that renegotiating Britain’s membership of Europe would end in ‘a messy middle-of-the-road muddle’, Wilson replied that he felt ‘at his best in a messy middle-of-the-road muddle’. This from Wilson’s official biographer, Philip Ziegler. Wilson had one or two good jokes, unlike Callaghan or poor Attlee, so often the butt of other people’s ...”

“... Liz Carlyle, Stella Rimington’s fictional MI5 officer, is a bit of a puzzle to fans of sleuthing, spookery and old-fashioned cloak and dagger. The trouble, to begin with anyhow, is that in Secret Asset, ‘the second Liz Carlyle novel’ (Hutchinson, £12.99), inference and deduction are decidedly lowbrow skills. We can tell this right away from the information on the dustjacket: ‘Liz Carlyle learns from one of her agents that suspicious meetings have been taking place at an Islamic bookshop ...”

“... surrounded by all the technical gear you need to stay afloat. Breton caps à la Lenin (and Jeremy Corbyn) and ‘Ensign beanies’, a strong seller, were also on show. But the pullovers are the real stuff of legend. The Beerenberg is made from ‘black Welsh mountain wool’ and named for the world’s most northerly volcano: ‘high in the Arctic ...”

“... I spent​ the morning of 24 June listening to the referendum results on the BBC, slept briefly, opened the laptop and began looking into the possibility of Irish citizenship in a strangely upbeat frame of mind. I discovered later that my British relatives in France – in-laws, partner, children – were downloading documents about becoming French ...”

“... French voters in London were out in force on 22 April. At the new French school in Kentish Town – primary through lycée, fee-paying – there were four lines of blue and white tape running the length of the courtyard and hundreds of people moving towards the voting booths in a good-natured queue. Outside the gate a graphic designer in her thirties from Limousin said she’d voted left ...”

“... The main feature of Private Eye: The First Fifty Years, at the V&A until 8 January, is a large wall plastered with the magazine’s covers. A monumental celebration, on a grand scale, of a scruffy little rag whose production values, to this day, owe much to its memorable antecedent, the British Railways lavatory roll. It’s a good thing that only one of them has lived to tell the tale ...”