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“... into Scouse, seedbed of poetry and stronghold of music hall as well as of the high culture of the Walker Gallery and the orchestras. Arthur Ballard, one of Lennon’s teachers at the art school, has rightly said that it took twenty years’ work to create the culture which produced John Lennon. A deeper study of this period would show Lennon systematically ...”

“... as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom as ‘Brooklynese speech’. But at least it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is – a ‘companion’, not a history. I wish I could say the same for the season’s lot of general surveys, which look so authoritative to the ...”

“... now I have taken the view that my ‘Desert Island’ book, if I were asked, would have to be David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. First published in 1970, it has just re-appeared as A Biographical Dictionary of Film in a third edition that is revised and considerably enlarged. Despite its titles it is indeed a work of ...”

“... David Mitchell​ is a career-long genre-bender. Only with his fourth book, Black Swan Green (2006), did he raid his own store of experience to write a first-novelish novel, a charming if low-key coming-of-age story, set in Worcestershire in 1982, full of references to Findus Crispy Pancakes, the Falklands War and playground slang ...”

“... of interest to literate businessmen. Sent on assignment to Alabama in 1936, with the photographer Walker Evans, to do an article on tenant farmers, he returned with unorganised pages and sections of finished prose, prose-in-the-rough, poetry, extended captions and descriptions, none of them reducible to an article in Fortune. Agee’s manuscript kept soaking ...”

“... can read them later. There is also a flashback to a time when Zeena and her partner (Ian Keith; David Strathairn) were in vaudeville. Their act involved working a complicated code, where one of them would apparently be repeating questions from the audience but was actually signalling facts about the questioners. In the city, a different kind of trick is ...”

“... a day spent in Harrods and Swan and Edgar. In Paris he is a persistent boulevardier, especially a walker of unfashionable boulevards in the middle of the night, a man who has walked a great deal from choice or from loneliness or because he has missed the last métro home (or because on occasion he did catch it and then fell asleep and woke up at the ...”

“... V & A. Following the example of his father, Sir Joseph Joel Duveen, who commissioned W.H. Romaine-Walker to create the Turner Wing (the first Turner Wing, opened in 1910), Joseph Duveen had already paid for the new modern foreign galleries and the Sargent Gallery, which were inaugurated in 1927 (also partly the work of Romaine-...”

“... Modern​ Hollywood isn’t really Hollywood – it’s Calabasas. With everyone now the David O. Selznick of his own social picture, gossip replaced with tweets, and fan magazines with selfies, the grandeur of old Hollywood can seem mythical. Like proper myths, its stories are almost exclusively about metamorphosis, self-destruction and things going wrong, but they are at least stories as opposed to advertisements ...”

“... and promise a film that doesn’t arrive, or arrives only in pieces. Marie Antoinette (Catherine Walker) approaches her death in a tumbril. She doesn’t look scared, just scornful of the audience and her executioners. In a striking shot her head is placed between boards to receive the falling blade, but the boards don’t fit into place immediately. A ...”

“... new spaces for modern and contemporary art back on Fifth Avenue, which are to be designed by David Chipperfield on a budget of $600 million (the rumour is that this amount will be reduced). Four years ago the Met’s current director, Thomas Campbell, hired Sheena Wagstaff, head of exhibitions at Tate Modern, to lead the curatorial charge, and she has ...”

“... make it agree with common sense and science. The anthology contains a very good article by Ralph Walker explaining this development. Time, space and causation all suffer under Berkeley’s phenomenological pointillism. Maybe this would not have satisfied Boswell, but there are philosophical arguments which are best countered not by head-on confrontation but ...”

“... Fourteen inches by 11, and weighing six pounds 13 ounces, David O. Selznick’s Hollywood is less a coffee-table book than a coffee table without legs. Its credits ape a blockbuster movie’s: ‘Executive Producer: Robert Gottlieb – Associate Producer: Martha Kaplan’, etc; and its first page opens like cinema curtains on a wider-than-Panavision main title modelled on Gone with the Wind ...”

“... after the Second World War.’ She gives much of the credit for this shift in taste to Elizabeth David, who in the 1950s preached that the fruits of the earth were more than mere adjuncts to flesh. Now the high price of meat is doing Mrs David’s work for her. The campaign has been waged mostly by women, over the dead ...”

“... reading – and then reviewing for this very publication – a biography of Franz Liszt by Alan Walker.* I was also reading – for amusement – the biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd and one of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade. In Holroyd’s book, I was most struck by some portraits – reproduced in full colour – that had been done of ...”