“... have been a ‘prodigy of learning’: ‘At four years old I could read uncommonly well.’ As a young woman she published a five-act drama, The Siege of Jerusalem, in verse that nearly scans, about Saladin and his betrothed, the unfortunate Princess Erminia, who loves a Christian. Although Linnaean classifications were ‘too smutty’ for English women ...”

“... had become a more strident ideological statement than it had been during the previous decades. The Young Conservatives’ conference during the 1983 general election campaign offered the unappealing spectacle of Kenny Everett, wearing a pair of gigantic foam-rubber gloves, bounding on stage and shouting ‘Let’s bomb Russia!’ and ‘Let’s kick Michael ...”

“... after he bought the Spectator for an inflated £100 million last September, its chairman, Andrew Neil, resigned, signing off with a barbed tweet about editorial independence. ‘You can have all the resources in the world,’ Neil wrote, ‘but if you don’t understand what really makes the Spectator tick then they will be as naught’ (the two had ...”

“... Joseph Brodsky recommended him to the New Yorker, which soon published a number of his stories; Andrew Wylie took him on as a client; Knopf published his books. But what he longed for was publication in Russia. Appearing in the New Yorker didn’t mean much to him, though he understood it was prestigious. Unlike Brodsky, he never started writing in ...”

“... 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 ...”