“... exclude technology, Patriotism Appeal and the royal sod. They have on the whole excluded Kipling. Andrew Rutherford’s 1971 Penguin selection tried to smuggle him in by putting the emphasis on the later, more psychologically and artistically complex stories. But as Angus Wilson (President of the Kipling Society) pointed out in his 1977 biography, this ...”

“... Dylan Thomas’s biographers have mostly thought of him as a big baby – ‘infantile’ is Andrew Lycett’s preferred word, though he has others – who was nothing like as good as he should have been; and whose life, a terrible thing with all its fecklessness and boozing and blathering, was redeemed only by the extraordinary things that were his ...”

“... chewy, highly extracted flavours of black fruits, iron, earth and spicy wood’) with Andrew Jefford in the Financial Times on a Georges Duboeuf 2003 cru Beaujolais (‘This dark wine … helicopters into the mouth with spinning blades of intense fruit,’ combining ‘finesse and elegance with near-beefy depth’), or with the Wall Street Journal ...”

“... fine set-pieces, like a lunatic expedition undertaken in midwinter by the narrator and his friend Andrew Kreis, nicknamed Cheese, to the high Drakensberg, where they nearly die of hunger and exposure. (Why ‘Cheese’? The author offers no explanation. He leaves it to his readers to put nickname and surname together – and say them out loud.) There is also ...”

“... the genre aside – ‘(chiefly derog.) literature which is perceived or marketed as appealing to young women’ – it is not the fault of Helen Fielding’s comedy of manners. Fielding’s blundering, know-nothing heroine, ‘rudderless and boyfriendless’ at 32, has been imitated in any number of opportunistic rip-offs, in which the incidental comic ...”

“... the prints are grouped by the authors of the paintings on which they are based, the room – and Andrew Wilton’s excellent essay on this aspect of the show – invites us to focus on the printmakers, especially the French Protestant immigrant François Vivares, and the brilliant William Woollett, who became the finest, the most intricate and industrious ...”

“... Waltz), the head of Spectre and by coincidence both the son and the murderer of a man who took the young Bond under his wing. Oberhauser is operating a contraption that threatens to deprive Bond of his facial recognition abilities by driving a pair of pins into the sides of his skull – a painful operation in its initial stages, as indicated by Craig’s ...”

“... Africa. Tranströmer, who died last year, trained as a psychologist and all his life worked with young people. Literature – which meant a dozen short volumes of poetry (not more than 250 pages, all told) and a vivid and attractively straightforward memoir of his childhood, also short, called Memories Look at Me – was almost a sideline for ...”

“... come from another world – they were certainly out of place in early 1990s London, awash with hip young conceptualists.One of the most striking of Kitaj’s images, included in the current exhibition at Piano Nobile (until 26 January), is a large charcoal drawing on canvas from 1977 of his mother, Jeanne Brooks. She was a ‘tough old bird’, Kitaj ...”

“... of the Malvinas. Ask the Prime Minister, and she will reply in honeyed tones to you, me or Jimmy Young in terms of repossession. The incredible part – or is it so incredible? – is that no rational thought has been applied to the long-term future of the islands. Had there been any cerebral action in the matter, what began as comic opera in South ...”

“... the economy bags.’‘Someone came in on Christmas Eve and asked for banana leaves,’ the keen young product manager over in fruit and vegetables told me, ‘and you know something? We had them.’You would have to say that Sainsbury’s is amazing. It has everything – 50 kinds of tea, 400 kinds of bread, kosher chicken schnitzels, Cornish pilchards ...”

“... range and variety of approaches represented by its different authors. Particularly illuminating is Andrew Walker’s essay devoted to Cassatt’s early years. Far from being a timid stay-at-home, her professional ambitions led her far afield in search of instruction and inspiration. She got what she could out of the ‘fusty, fudgy’ Pennsylvania Academy of ...”

“... from doughboys grateful for One of Ours, and what Cather called ‘love letters’ from young men struck by the September-May romance of A Lost Lady. And she lived, according to some posthumous critics, as a closeted homosexual. Cather had many potential reasons for forbidding publication of her letters. Willa Cather in New Hampshire in ...”

“... invisible barrier separates old from new fairy stories, like the glass wall round the princess in Andrew Lang’s Crimson Fairy Book. In the new ones, however accomplished and diverting they may be, the meaning is clear but coyly hidden, as in many modern fictions; although the examples sought out by Alison Lurie have as much cunning and high spirits in them ...”

“... in Ovid or Apuleius, shaping them into structured, complex narrative cycles. In more recent times, Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books come to mind as equivalents, and Penguin’s gilded and engraved, peacock blue, Islamicate blockboard cover increases this affinity (though the volume is not otherwise illustrated). The plotting in these tales lacks shape and ...”