“... their passion and solace from charges of idiocy, rather than from the musicologically qualified: Peter Conrad’s A Song of Love and Death is a distinguished and often fascinating example of this phenomenon. Attempts to transform (or, in Conrad’s case, deconstruct) La Sonnambula or Les Pêcheurs de Perles into matter worthy of learned discourse also ...”

“... whose glinting eyes, in Reynolds’s 1778 portrait, stare fixedly past us from the dust-jacket of Peter Martin’s biography. Indeed the book’s steady prose, for all its professions of admiration, does little to suggest that Martin (the first writer to undertake a life of Malone since 1860) has managed to muster much of the personal empathy and enthusiasm ...”

“... 4 January. A Christmas letter from Cami Elbow, wife of Peter Elbow, an American college friend who teaches English at Amherst: Life in Amherst is very placid. Even grammatically correct. In December the town decided to encourage shoppers to patronise the downtown stores with free parking. They ordered plastic bags to cover up the parking meters but the bags arrived with the message wrongly punctuated: ‘Season’s Greeting’s ...”

“... When We talk of narrative poetry today,’ James Fenton asks in the September issue of Poetry Review, ‘are we referring to the kind of story in which, you want to know what happens next? I think not. I think that kind of story is deliberately excluded from consideration.’ It’s a well-timed question, with Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s advocacy of narrative in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry being so widely and respectfully read, and well-directed too, since it clarifies what’s confused in the Penguin introduction by the editors’ simultaneous recommendation of Post-Modernist ‘secrecy’ and the Keatsian ‘long poem ...”

“... take confirmation in it from the other books under review. Charles Tomlinson’s Annunciations and Peter Porter’s Possible Worlds share Renaissance Virgins for cover illustrations. Tomlinson’s is Lorenzo Lotto’s Annunciation, in which the angel has just leapt spectacularly over the balcony, terrifying the cat, to make his declaration to an overcome and ...”

“... Paul Foot, now its politics are rightish, its stance prurient, and its key figures Nigel Dempster, Peter McKay and Auberon Waugh. The radical lampoon has become required reading on the magazine syllabus of every Sloane Ranger. Moreover, the Eye, that fearless exposer of the faintest mafia, now runs a comfortable little establishment of its own. Consider how ...”

“... and generalisation that pertain in the natural sciences. The endeavour to frame such laws – what James Bohman characterises as the ‘strong programme’ or ‘old logic of social sciences’ – has been under attack for decades. And Hawthorn is not just pressing the familiar, if not banal arguments for hermeneutics or restating Stanley Fish’s claim that ...”

“... the border the old Roman road – now the A140 – which heads north from Ipswich towards Norwich. James Bettley, who has already revised Essex, is responsible for the expansion. The Buildings of England series has left Penguin for Yale University Press, who have both overseen the third edition of the series and continued with the new volumes of Buildings of ...”

“... on Banbury Road in Oxford, said to have been installed by the Royal Mail to ease the labours of James Murray at the helm of the Oxford English Dictionary. With a magnificent incuriosity, I never thought to wonder at the strangeness of a post box positioned to enable a dictionary – it was simply where I deposited weekly letters to my friend Marian, who ...”

“... attached fireworks. The finale in 1579 of the annual display in Rome to mark the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul made the engraver Giovanni Ambrogio Brambilla feel ‘as if all the air in the world is filled with fireworks, and all the stars in the heavens are falling to earth – a thing truly stupendous, and marvellous to behold’. Reformation and ...”

“... there is no difficulty, as Thompson points out, in reinterpreting it as a Downton Abbey affair. James Fox’s articles in the Sunday Times and the New Review saw in it the ‘whole waterlogged English class system’ sinking under its own weight. But the system has proved remarkably buoyant. Old Etonians and alumni of the Bullingdon Club continue to ...”

“... is dark and slippery and began by turning the former hero, Jim Phelps, long and suavely played by Peter Graves, into a faintly smiling villain played by Jon Voight. This did not go down well with everyone. Martin Landau, who was the master of disguise in the television series, said the original show ‘was a mind game. The ideal mission was getting in and ...”

“... Kubrick’s Lolita, handsomely set up by the director and beautifully spun out by the actor. Peter Sellers, as the creepy and protean Clare Quilty, has struck up a conversation with James Mason, as Humbert Humbert. The latter is in no mood for any kind of conversation, since he is just marking time before he returns to ...”

“... stand by and pretend that she didn’t care, not just for her own sake, but for mine. Her husband, Peter, was well liked by the hardnut, Rangers Club toughs and, if our affair was ever discovered, she knew exactly what would happen to us both – especially to me. Still, whatever the emotion was that I had seen in her face, it quickly melted away as she nodded ...”

“... which it held for him. His relations with the Lobby ranged from love affair to stormy divorce. James Callaghan lacked Wilson’s flair as a political news editor but took a self-conscious pride in his acquired mastery of the trade’s little tricks. ‘You know the difference between leaking and briefing,’ he told a colleague. ‘Leaking is what you ...”