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“... in an eternity of vain research along endless shelves.’ Jump forward seventy years, and for David Lodge’s Pooteresque Adam Appleby, the BM is a cosy, quintessentially safe asylum. Adam’s working life there is a matter of daily comforting rituals, as when he cools his research-fevered brow on the downstairs men’s lavatory cistern. The BM shelters ...”

“... If this is the case when the ‘facts’ are right, how much more so when they are wrong? Hugh David’s book about Stephen Spender misleads in every way, factually as well as aesthetically, although in the general welter of disinformation it is barely possible to distinguish fact from treatment. As David’s previous ...”

“... commonplace had found a champion who could wear its colours with all the ceremony of greatness.’ David Skal’s new biography of Stoker follows his 2004 study, Hollywood Gothic, which managed to take Dracula on page, stage and screen seriously, but not too seriously. It becomes clear reading the Cambridge Companion to ‘Dracula’ how difficult it is to ...”

“... to fillet felines these days.’ Some of us followed Doom because we thought we were too cool for David Blaine. Doom’s tricks were breath control, intricate rhyme schemes, a beating heart beneath the cold veneer, of which he gave us only occasional glimpses. Now you see it, now you don’t.In his six solo studio albums, numerous collaborations and ...”

“... image handed down in history books and conversation, which is plainly not good enough.’ It is David Bromwich’s aim in The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke that people should know a good deal more about what Burke actually said and wrote. This is the first of two projected volumes; the second will cover the two great causes of Burke’s later life: the ...”

“... renders most other fiction meaningless. One can imagine Pynchon and Ballard and Stephen King and David Foster Wallace bowing at Mark Danielewski’s feet, choking with astonishment, surprise, laughter and awe. I feel privileged to be among its first readers. Will I ever recover?’ House of leaves has at least three narrative strands, with at least as many ...”

“... reminder that, with rare exceptions, photographers find what they come looking for. Not that this means the show is a failure. What soon becomes clear is how much the UK has been read through its social groups: royalty and the aristocracy in the south, working and industrial classes to the north and west. The upstairs downstairs divide is still deeply ...”

“... of Arabs into Nazareth, as he calls it, is a national priority. The city was built in the 1950s. David Ben-Gurion was outraged by the presence of so many Arabs in the Galilee when he toured the region in 1953, a few days before he retired for a year and half from his premiership. He appointed the director general of the Ministry of Defence, Shimon Peres, to ...”

“... to extend British airstrikes against Islamic State from Iraq to Syria began in November when David Cameron set out his case to Parliament in relatively decorous terms. By 2 December, when Parliament voted in favour, an older, cruder performance had emerged. One of the prime minister’s enactments back in November was the voice that accompanies TV ...”

“... extremely common view: that the Nazis successfully appealed to a defeated and stricken people by means of a uniquely dramatised form of ideology and propaganda. This is the view of Hitler as Pied Piper. It is strongly evoked by the cover of the Stachura volume, which depicts the Nazis marching through the Brandenburg Gate on the night Hitler became ...”

“... cabled back his choice: ‘The British Museum is falling down.’ Not a bad title, by any means, particularly when one recalls that the nursery rhyme, ‘London Bridge is falling down’, is supposed to have originated in a double entendre about male potency, but very much second-best. This was not the only setback I experienced in connection with the ...”

“... side to stay on top for the whole of a single day’s play, never mind all four or five. This means that no game is ever done until it is done, and no team can ever feel entirely secure about the way things are going. The nerviness, second-guessing and never-say-die heroics that this produces are what give each game its intense drama. This has ...”

“... too natural for art that Wood discerns in the death scene in The Pleasure Garden has found a means other than jesting last words to embed itself in the narrative. Hitchcock, who never forgot what he’d learned as a director of silent films, understood that he didn’t need words at all, jesting or otherwise. For all the light at their disposal, his ...”

“... sense of a different culture at work. Churchill’s War Cabinet and its media outlets were by no means immune to the appeal of good propaganda, as the pages of photographs of getting in the harvest all over England in the autumn of 1940 make perfectly clear. But for some reason there is no urge to represent the lives and faces of the dead, or even to name ...”

“... whole seem to care, what is being kept from us. That is rather special; and a major factor, claims David Vincent in this path-breaking book, in our governance. It can have ludicrous effects. One was the refusal to acknowledge that we had any ‘secret services’: until recently, MI5 and MI6 had no official existence. Questions about them in Parliament were ...”