“... and launched, first as HMS Montrose, just before Christmas 1920. An Armed Merchant Cruiser of the Campbell class, she was fitted with eight six-inch guns and two three-inch anti-aircraft batteries. In 1940, the ship was guarding the sea around the Shetland Isles and, sometimes, it would lead a convoy through the dangerous waters off the west of Ireland. A ...”

“... does, somewhere between literary respectability and bestsellerdom: John O’Hara, Nelson Algren, James Jones, John Hersey. Parini declares in a fighting Afterword that answers to the Steinbeck question ‘spring to mind’. Clearly the answer which springs highest and most persistently is intellectual snobbery. Steinbeck’s low status is ascribed to the ...”

“... as any a three-dimensional work can offer – more so, for example, than what happens to you with James Turrell’s light pieces, even the most minimal. The rest of the Hayward (Gormley has used every gallery and taken over spaces in corners and behind the stairs as well) is filled with things. Some are as much architecture as artwork; many, like Blind ...”

“... another pleasure of work seen in a provincial context. For example, Eardley studied briefly with James Cowie, whose painting of two schoolgirls (more Jean Brodie than Balthus, but with a bit of both) is tightly composed and painted – the opposite in handling and drawing of Eardley’s child portraits. It is not surprising that she argued with him. But to ...”

“... Ponting assaults the entire political and administrative apparatus, retail and in gross, while Campbell and Connor go for the army of snoopers and data-gatherers. What they share is a thought which would have shocked a previous generation of political commentators – the thought that the British Civil Service is absolutely not to be trusted, that the ...”

“... of Osbert Lancaster’s drawings, cartoons, illustrations and set and costume designs, selected by James Knox, will begin at the Wallace Collection on 2 October. Lancaster was a short man with a big head, strikingly large blue eyes, a curled moustache and a dandy’s taste for very good, but emphatic clothes (pink shirts, bow ties). He surveyed English society ...”

“... commentary is not new. The patchwork made in his spare time in the decade between 1842 and 1852 by James Williams, a Welsh tailor, shows Cain and Abel, Noah and his ark and no end of animals. It also applauds modern engineering with representations of the Menai suspension bridge and the Cefn viaduct. There are patriotic and religious quilts which would elevate ...”

“... actual motion, and done with such light airy facility. Oh! it delighted me when I saw it,’ James Northcote, a pupil of Reynolds, said, having watched Gainsborough at work on Queen Charlotte’s drapery.But these accounts of his later practice are irrelevant to the pictures one turns to first: those crisp, bright, freshly coloured group portraits in ...”

“... the sometimes charming young lady painters.’ Du Maurier offered the plot of Trilby to Henry James, who didn’t take it up but who had, in The American, already noted the same class of Louvre lady painter: Christopher Newman looked ‘not only at all the pictures, but at all the copies that were going forward around them, in the hands of those ...”

“... Britain (until 17 September) there are writings, culled from various sources, by Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Susan Sontag, William Boyd, Bruce Chatwin, Bruce Bernard and Colm Tóibín (Barnes has also made a loan to the exhibition). Some are affectionately biographical. Comparisons between Hodgkin’s art of memory and Proust’s are made.* The pleasure ...”

“... subsequently ‘discovered’ and launched as a public performer, she spoke of the time when King James had roamed the country as a gaberlunzie man as if it was just a moment before yesterday. What she sang seemed to her to be fact, or at any rate truth, and her historical sense collapsed chronology. I was moved to remember this by J.F.C. Harrison’s ...”

“... the series gave me my first sight of the work of T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and I believe James Joyce, though I learn from the volume before me that Sir John Reith, reigning at the BBC, forbade Nicolson to mention Ulysses, then banned. Little encounters of that kind were to be expected in those days, and Nicolson seems not to have attempted to reason ...”

“... Blyth in Northumberland, to see their old friend, the former Labour MP and miners’ leader Ronnie Campbell, who was gravely ill. It was a private visit by one left-wing insubordinate to another, by a campaigner who tried to re-radicalise Labour to one of his most loyal supporters. I only found out about it when I was sitting in the front room of the ...”

“... recall to current political debate, if only to induce a necessary modesty. K.J. Fielding and Ian Campbell, the British side of the joint Anglo-American team producing the letters, have taken time off to edit Carlyle’s Reminiscences. They have stripped away the varnish laid on by previous editors and reinserted what earlier prudence deleted. The ...”

“... makes no appearance. Other diarists of the period are less flattering. In May 1996 Alastair Campbell mentions Mandelson’s ‘ridiculous social life’; at his 43rd birthday party later that year, hosted by the ‘social-climbing Tory’ Carla Powell, Campbell is put in mind of ‘Peter’s absent friends, the ones ...”