“... a bibliographical note, ‘the most recent work does not necessarily mean the most useful or the best’; ‘modern perceptions of productivity and scholarship’ preclude the substance of older works; ‘the approach of some older works may seem unfashionable, but the content is frequently more detailed.’ Both of us, I think, work at a critical but ...”

“... he saw the address on the letter: ‘From Guillaume Budé, his erstwhile friend, to Erasmus, with best wishes – and never again’. And it goes on in the same tone: ‘your ill-tempered letter’, your ‘barbed jests, double-edged and full of menace’. Budé dated it from ‘Paris, 31 October, having received your letter yesterday; bad luck to it!’ Part ...”

“... know more about the history of the 16th century than I know about anything else; I have spent the best years of my life in reading and writing about it.’ The Tudors were familiar, but they hadn’t hitherto been known: no one had ever supposed that they were worth knowing about. Bluff King Hal, Bloody Mary, the Queen of Scots, the Virgin Queen: like Drake ...”

“... film, directed by Wilder, was a critical and popular smash hit, garnering Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Spurred by this success, RKO produced the first Marlowe picture, Farewell, My Lovely (retitled Murder, My Sweet), in a big-budget, A-movie format. Meanwhile Knopf had reissued the first two ...”

“... Shakespeare? Didn’t you realise he was the Earl of Oxford? The other problem is that even the best examples can’t entirely avoid the naive reduction of literature to evidence or symptom – epiphenomena which are brought about by, and potentially reducible to, biographical origins. These generic pressures set up a conflict between literary biography and ...”

“... But what about countries where the civil service barely functions, where the rule of law is at best an aspiration and leaders deploy real weapons against their own people as well as metaphorical ones? The deliverologists would say it is even more important to have clear targets and a separate machinery for achieving them when the rest of the government is ...”

“... in the spring of 1533, presumably to prevent him from interrupting the divorce proceedings. What best characterises the man and the nature of his faith is his weeping for joy on hearing the prophecy of Elizabeth Barton, the nun of Kent, that if Henry were to marry Anne, he would not remain king for long. Once Fisher and More and a handful of public opponents ...”

“... this lack of poise is a positive thing, part of Epstein’s style, but it seems probable that, at best, it will in the end be judged a provincialism, akin to Hogarth’s ramshackle perspective. Although Gardiner insists that Epstein was highly self-critical, his output was variable. Many of the portrait busts are very fine, others are botched. When he turned ...”

“... than purely musical. In various autobiographical statements Stravinsky dismissed the help of Nicholas Roerich in the elaboration of the scenario: Taruskin redresses the balance by describing in detail Roerich’s contribution and four Russian sources he probably used for elaborating the ballet’s striking visual imagery. Stravinsky shaped events to make ...”

“... But The Climate of Treason is not one of these hagiograms. They really talked: David Footman, Nicholas Elliott, Sir Robert Mackenzie, George Carey-Foster, Sir Frederick Warner, agents and diplomats on the security side, and a large anonymous group of Intelligence men from both branches of the service, retired and active. The reason can be guessed ...”

“... was in danger of falling out.’ In these matters Pym has an undoubted resemblance to Jane Austen. Nicholas Spice, in his perceptive review of Crampton Hodnet in these columns, pointed out that in many ways the Pym world is as black as hell, the vision of marriage or celibacy, work and play, equally scarifying. D.W. Harding and other academic critics have ...”

“... of Richter’s work at Tate Modern is a great event. It is beautifully hung by Mark Godfrey and Nicholas Serota: packed tight and relentless room after room, by the end exhausting, and in this entirely true to Richter’s half-century of effort. The selection of work could not be better, with things often seen before enlivened by juxtaposition with the ...”

“... to the Music of Time; and the memoirs, journals and journalism. Afternoon Men might not be the best of the early books, but on the other hand it might, and it’s certainly characteristic of the world and manner of the period – like Waugh’s Decline and Fall it has the attractive bloom of first-book freshness. It is told mainly in dialogue; it describes ...”

“... draws on extensive conversations with jewellers and miners, and he interviewed cooks about the best ways to prepare broths from animal fat or to curdle milk to produce different kinds of cheese. Noting that people get hungrier in cold places than in warm, he remarks with some hyperbole that ‘one Pole or German eats more in a single day than a Lombard or ...”

“... every respect to the people is deeply ingrained. Our culture is still one of subjecthood, at its best paternal and at its worst authoritarian.’ This hostility to the way the Left (as well as the Right) has conventionally run its and the country’s affairs is also to be found in the essays on economic and social policy. Christopher Huhne, in a ...”