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“... There’s​ a supercut on YouTube called ‘All James Bond Cat Close-Ups in Chronological Order’, which strings together every scene in which Blofeld’s feathery white Persian takes centre stage. It’s shorter than you might think: just three and a half minutes, beginning with the cat’s debut appearance in From Russia with Love (1963), glaring into the middle distance while her master strokes her ears with both hands, and ending with her brief turn in Spectre (2015), wriggling out of Christoph Waltz’s grasp ...”

“... Leiris. It has pondered the theory of the sign, foregrounded photography and helped to install Peter Bürger’s 1974 essay ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’ (translated into English in 1984) as a founding text of alternative cultural criticism. October’s influence on arts professionals has been powerful and lasting, though the editors in feistily refusing ...”

“... Palmer concentrated on white revolutionaries, in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved in France’s richest Caribbean colony than to the inhabitants of ...”

“... while a quietly seething poisoner would look dreary and unstylishly old hat. In this book, James Whorton makes it clear that dealing death by poison was not, after all, exclusively suburban, although, apart from later industrial disasters, it does seem to have been almost entirely domesticated. The poison in Whorton’s book is specifically ...”

“... women minded it more), then it must have been as obscure as the hurt allegedly suffered by Henry James, since nobody so far has convincingly explained it. Ted’s father and grandfather were convivial, easygoing men, rooted in their native Kent, fond of a drink and ready to pinch any passing bottom. On his 80th birthday, Heath père, who had started life as ...”

“... friends in a charmed circle. This even applies in some degree to so deliberately moving a poem as James Fenton’s ‘Children in Exile’, describing the arrival in Italy of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees. I hear a child moan in the next room and I see    The nightmare spread like rain across his face And his limbs twitch in some vestigial combat ...”

“... who were more or less starving and had taken to shoemaking with little success. The defiant James Ings was a butcher. Dr James Watson was an apothecary who happened to be in debtors’ prison when the conspiracy erupted and so escaped arrest and trial. He had been an ingenious armourer for the plot, devising letter ...”

“... for them. Recordings were designed to be accessible, but also to last. ‘From the Supremes,’ James Gavin writes, ‘Michael got his first taste of the catchy hooks and beats that made a pop song unforgettable.’ Or as Michael put it, ‘I knew how to make these records and make them jump out the radio.’In 1975, when Michael was twelve, his family ...”

“... canvas, and it is not even certain that his lines portraying it, which were first printed under James I, had been written by 1601 (though it has suited some critics to assert, without evidence, that they were ‘censored’). The Government prosecutors, admittedly, had good reason to emphasise the enactment of Richard’s overthrow, which they took as ...”

“... on the various ways in which Cather – in Acocella’s view the only American novelist besides James to rival Tolstoy and Flaubert for beauty of style and moral depth – had been manhandled by contemporary academic critics. The story Acocella told was one of noble articulation – Cather’s poised, pared-down imaginative utterance – overwhelmed by ...”

“... till thou return unto the ground.’ The New English Bible translates as ‘labour’ what King James’s scholars called ‘sorrow’ – ‘Accursed shall be the ground on your account. With labour you shall win your food from it.’ A few pages later comes the very odd passage in which Noah’s son Ham sees him naked when drunk. Awakening from his ...”

“... slowly become clear. The revelations of the Grenfell inquiry, so plainly and painfully recorded by Peter Apps of Inside Housing, are echoed not just in thousands of other cases of ghastly what-might-have-beens but in the lackadaisical, flailing process of undoing what was done.* The inquiry revealed a tangle of deniability masquerading as responsibility, with ...”

“... for a media award these days: undermining of elected authority.’ His second pet hate is Peter Hennessy – one of the very few journalists to explore and expose the inner recesses of the Civil Service. Sir Bernard hates Brian Redhead of the Today programme, which he regards as subversive, hates Mark Lawson of the Independent, whom he describes as a ...”

“... Zealand’s “best” writers grouped around Katherine Mansfield, Allen Curnow, Frank Sargeson, James K. Baxter and Janet Frame’. Serious fiction and poetry have been ‘privileged’ over other genres, which have been ‘marginalised’. All this needs correction, ‘Even the notion of “literature” itself,’ he continues, ‘must come under ...”

“... but ended up running a tiny, undemanding parish in the City, overshadowed by St Paul’s. Robert Peter, a brilliant Classics scholar at Cambridge, ‘achieved so little because he was a fool’; moreover, he was cruel to choirboys and horses. Henry Carrington, a dilettante, failed to take on the Dissenters, resorted to wintering in Italy, leaving curates ...”