“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... community’ of Scotland only exist completely in song? Can it live by culture alone? Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, a bitter opponent of the 1707 Union, quoted a famous saying: ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ The novelist James Robertson loves this; he complains that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or perhaps, in the first instance, prints and reproductions – seem to have attracted him from a young age. When, in the early 1870s, Frick applied for a loan from a Pittsburgh bank, the partner who authorised it noted in his report: ‘Maybe a little too enthusiastic about pictures but not enough to hurt; knows his business down to the ground; advise making ...”

“... Hae’ or ‘A Red, Red Rose’. While Paterson’s non-bard is wee enough to fit in a matchbox, Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg offer a bard of Victorian amplitude. The Canongate Burns runs to over a thousand pages, many of them by Noble and Hogg. A lot less stylish, their introduction alone is almost as long as Paterson’s whole book. They feel ...”

“... remain his academic home until his retirement, as its master, forty years later.Like many serious young people in the 1930s, Hill was appalled at what he saw as the failure of capitalism and the lurch towards fascism, finding in Marxism both a persuasive analysis of what was happening and a source of hope for a better world. In 1935 he spent six months in ...”

“... confirms that the neo-Victorian low-life, high-filth novel is doing well. To add to the buzz, Andrew Davies’s three-part adaptation of Waters’s first novel, Tipping the Velvet, has just been shown on TV. Waters’s tale of lesbian prostitution in the 1890s attracted publicity chiefly for the casting of Diana Rigg’s daughter, leather dildos and the ...”

“... inflexibility and his unfamiliarity with conditions in the far north were serious handicaps.’ Andrew Lambert, in his new biography of Franklin, an attempt to reclaim the explorer from both Victorian hagiography and subsequent disparagement, is less even-handed: ‘Whatever else had been achieved, Franklin had demonstrated a rare talent for ...”

“... as if his head had sprung an oil-can leak. He was nearly caught in a compromising position with a young actress pretending to be underage in the convoluted Borat Subsequent Moviefilm mockumentary. Then there was the shlock folly of the Four Seasons press conference held not at the regal Four Seasons hotel in Philadelphia, as was presumably intended, but at ...”