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“... too much of an optimist, too little of a polemicist to supply the Rousseauian rejoinder: ‘An art more pernicious to men than all the ills it pretends to cure’. But no one who follows Simon Schama’s advice helpfully prescribed in the blurb – ‘take a dose of the book at least once a day and retire early to bed’ – will sleep easy. In fact, two ...”

“... of Marlowe’s life, particularly of his childhood. Christopher Marlowe – or Marley, in the more common contemporary spelling, the one he used in his only extant signature – was born in the parish of St George, Canterbury, in February 1564. He was the son of John Marlowe, shoemaker, and Katherine née Arthur, a Dover woman. They had nine ...”

“... not her name, which Jem refuses to tell another friend when asked. Then it transpires that she is more likely a therapist than a lover: ‘Do you think it’s cruel that in the hour you have for me there are only fifty minutes? . . . One day I think you should take me home and let me sit at your table, a stranger there, to watch you with your family.’ So ...”

“... The novel perhaps owes to Greek tragedy the notion that the only sure consequence of murder is yet more murder, but the role of the classics is otherwise more decorative than structural, providing a badge of difference for the principal characters, a classy veneer of erudition (a little chipped in places) and some handy plot ...”

“... stained glass, though churches are always proud when they have a Piper window, the latest (and no more pleasing than the rest) glimpsed at Paul Scofield’s memorial service in St Margaret’s, Westminster. For all that, though, the book is immensely readable, drawing together so many strands of the artistic life in the 1930s and 1940s – K. Clark, Ben ...”

“... fringe. Somehow to see them both with these carefully considered haircuts makes the scene even more touching. 6 February. I am reading a history of the Yorkshire Dales by Robert White, one of a series, Landscape through Time, published by English Heritage. During the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing ...”

“... even ‘othering’ – continue to proliferate. At times, all this talk proves more fashionable than productive, turning ‘other’ into little more than a glib synonym for ‘victim’. Even as ‘otherness’ threatens to become all too familiar, however, thinking about the human impulse to distinguish ...”

“... admirer of Cézanne, Braque and Picasso, he was a very knowledgable collector and took few duties more seriously than his trusteeship of the National Gallery. He was equally passionate about literature, and could quote Shakespeare at enormous length. He was an enlightened president and governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre over many years and supported ...”

“... grow one. I can wait.’ Metcalf’s banter may be nearly as sharp as Marlowe’s, but he’s more self-conscious about his use of imagery. In the course of his inquisition he goes to see Stanhunt’s fellow urologist, Grover Testafer. At the house he meets the doctor’s lover, an evolved sheep called Dulcie. ‘“Okay,” I said. “You’re afraid of ...”

“... on 20 May at the Duck and Drake, off the Strand, the lodgings of his cousin and the disciple, Thomas Wintour. Three other men were invited: Jack Wright, a swordsman friend of Catesby’s; Thomas Percy, Wright’s brother-in-law and man of business to his kinsman, the magnate and Councillor the Earl of ...”

“... history and acknowledge that he had his own voice. The second reason is dubious. I agree with Thomas Kinsella’s view, in his Introduction to The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1986), that a ‘Northern Ireland Renaissance’ is ‘largely a journalistic entity’. Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Deane, Michael Longley ...”

“... marriages, open and covert sexual deviancy, secrets and suicides. It provided material for Thomas, Heinrich, Erika and Klaus Mann’s novels and plays, and for plenty of biographies and psycho-literary studies besides. Golo Mann is the third of Thomas and Katja Mann’s six children. He was born in 1909 and must have ...”

“... through the mill. Michael Millgate calls his new edition of the biography ‘The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy by Thomas Hardy’. Since he has stripped it of the thin marital disguise of his wife’s name and cleared it of Florence’s editorial emendations carried out after Hardy’s death, he feels able to present it as ...”

“... Legion: Life in the Roman Army (at the British Museum until 23 June) are a number of less martial, more everyday objects: louse combs, drinking vessels, tent pegs, manicure sets, games and, perhaps most arresting of all, a single red woollen sock, from about the third century AD. Most of the weapons and armour are in various states of decay, rusty and ...”

“... with the Light Brown Hair, the lost one ‘who comes not again’. The big Romantics all had their more portentous versions, from Lucy ceasing to be, to Shelley’s solipsistic sad heart, filled with grief ‘but with delight/No more, oh nevermore’. Poe’s sardonic raven enunciated ‘Nevermore’ as a standard ...”