“... added sugar at all. Sainsbury’s mustard is 19 times more sugary than the thing it’s emulating. Bee Wilson’s First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (Fourth Estate, £12.99) is a brilliant, heartfelt book about this crisis in our contemporary diet. She has an explanation for that mustard. It’s part of a general shift in our eating habits towards flavours ...”

“... Why, in a naturally selected world in which reproduction counts for everything, would a worker bee forego reproduction in order to assist her mother, the queen, in producing more offspring? In Darwinian terms, giving up the chance to breed is the most extreme form of altruism conceivable. Hamilton realised, however, that since we share genes with our ...”

“... a ‘politically corrupt regime’. Such monsters colluded with the treacherous governments of Wilson and Callaghan and their ‘attacks on the living standard of working-class people’. Most of these descriptions are generalised and ritualistic, though there is some more detailed comment on Bob Mellish’s business connections from which he certainly ...”

“... communicates a sense of exciting heterogeneity. Older readers may turn to the end item, by Angus Wilson, anticipating a return to the form in which he first excelled. But ‘Sri Lankan Journal’ is thin stuff. Never having kept a journal before, he tells us, Wilson decided to do so during the travelling that coincided ...”

“... William: Hamlet’ are barred from the BL to make room for the geriatric zany with a bee in his bonnet about the secret chamber of the Great Pyramid. Even by barring access to that part of the tax-paying, voting population that most needs it, BL 2000 is clearly going to have problems with the daily bums-to-seats ratio. One solution is hinted at ...”

“... of solan goose and eggs, A diet of dulse and sloke and sea-tangle, And ignorance of what a pig, a bee, a rat, Or rabbit look like, although they remember The three apples brought here by a traveller Five years ago, and have discussed them since. This opening passage shows some of the volume’s strengths, and a weakness. It is vividly observant, rich with a ...”

“... in toasters, household poisons, guns left loaded, kidnappers, serial killers, burst appendices, bee stings, hard candy chokings, croups untreated – he’d seen too many instances of God’s unwillingness to overrule the natural order which included, along with hurricanes and meteorites and other Acts of God, the aberrant disasters of childhood. So ...”

“... he had to be ready to do imitations of famous black singers, a football team or Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees.Elton and Bernie worked fast: ‘Bernie got the lyrics to “Your Song” over breakfast one morning in Frome Court, handed them to me and I wrote the music in 15 minutes flat.’ He didn’t go around with melodies in his head. ‘I don’t even think ...”

“... glorifying the work of the Velvet Underground over Motown releases, the production skills of Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and ...”

“... Histories: and I am thinking here of basic studies of the 1940s and 50s, like Dover Wilson’s The Fortunes of Falstaff, or useful popular books like Tillyard’s on Shakespeare’s History Plays.These early studies, with their monarchical interests, tended to be strongly conservative in their attitudes. They worked to defend the rejection of ...”

“... daughter, Harriet, Lowell began seeing a young poetry student who looked, according to Edmund Wilson, ‘like a Renoir’. On one occasion, the girl played hostess at their house in Boston, while Hardwick retreated upstairs to cry. Bishop cut short a visit in the summer of 1947 after Lowell began declaring that he was in love with her. When the couple ...”

“... between judicious sips of bottled water. Friends of the playwright Lillian Hellman, whom Edmund Wilson would describe in his journals as the queen bee of the Martha’s Vineyard ‘cocktail belt’, Styron and Rose would become champion party-throwers themselves up in Roxbury, Connecticut, between work-slogs. But by the ...”

“... written in New York on a typewriter purchased with money she made as a stringer for the Sacramento Bee. ‘I sat on one of my apartment’s two chairs and set the Olivetti on the other and wrote myself a Californian river.’ It’s a brilliant, precocious book, even if she now finds it tinged with ‘pernicious nostalgia’ or plain homesickness, not to ...”

“... picnickers are now singing the sentimental Late Victorian love-ballad, ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee’. Not everyone likes this extraordinary story. Both Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis have protested at its terse, incomprehensible oddity, and called it frankly bad. But most other admirers of Kipling, and indeed of good ...”

“... not all old ladies perhaps.’ February 1975 Miss S. rings and when I open the door she makes a bee-line for the kitchen stairs. ‘I’d like to see you. I’ve called several times. I wonder whether I can use the toilet first.’ I say I think this is pushing it a bit. ‘I’m not pushing it at all. I just will do the interview better if I can use the ...”