“... of Böttgher and Palissy make clear, Smiles’s heroes are not all Englishmen (though they are, as Peter Sinnema says, almost all male and European). Napoleon I does not always come out poorly from the frequent comparisons with the Duke of Wellington, and Smiles pointedly praises la carrière ouverte aux talents characteristic of the French but not of the ...”

“... by way of adults – parents, teachers, librarians and so on. The best reason for learning to read is to escape from what they prescribe or tolerate. Being neither buyers nor readers, the ultimate audience for picture books is doubly disadvantaged when it comes to influencing what is provided for them. Yet it has on the whole been well served by the ...”

“... I was a friend and devoted admirer of Peter Cook for thirty years but I never realised until I read this book how much our early lives had overlapped. We were born in the same week into the same sort of family. His father, like mine, was a colonial servant rushing round the world hauling down the Imperial flag ...”

“... Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621, Robert Burton condemned ‘that pestilent booke’, ‘not to be read without shuddering’.) Minois delights in strange, Eco-esque vignettes of doomed book-hunting obsessives, like Christina, the daughter of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who criss-crossed Europe in the 1650s looking for De tribus, flinging out rewards for ...”

“... On the front cover of The Battle for Bermondsey there is a photograph of Peter Tatchell as, I imagine, he would like to be seen: a steady innocent gaze, a determined tilt to the chin, a youthful crusading air. He looks fragile but brave. In the background, slightly out of focus, is an older comrade looking decidedly askance, not to say horrified ...”

“... of De Amore, published by J.J. Parry over forty years ago, is entitled The Art of Courtly Love. ‘Read Andreas, and you have at your fingertips the risqué recommendations followed by the ladies and gentlemen of Medieval Europe in the conduct of their love-affairs. Understand De Amore, and you have cracked the troubadours’ code of love.’ Such are the ...”

“... a notice tacked to the entrance of his 1951 exhibition in the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, read: ‘There is a tendency to look at large pictures from a distance. The large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen from a short distance.’Then, with your visual field filled to overflowing, see what happens, attending in particular to the way ...”

“... of Oxbridge voices reviewing an exhibition selected by and posthumously mounted as a tribute to Peter Fuller. The wannabe Oxbridge voice of Giles Auty, art bumbler for the Spectator, declares ‘Peter’ was led by his arguments rather than his eyes. Up speaks real Oxbridge voice, while duly patronising to Auty – not ...”

“... looks at the history of oral versus silent prayer and the consequences of the privacy the silently-read page offers – one was that, in the late Middle Ages and Early Modern period, margins could show erotic scenes ‘unimaginable in public art or publicly displayed liturgical texts’. Alain Bourea traces the various uses of hagiography. The book of a ...”

“... give them titles, since they are based on reality’), the figures are fierce enough to be easily read as expressions of political despair. ‘Still Life with Old Shoe’, 1937 You meet the question of just how art that stayed clear of straightforward propaganda might express the spirit of bad times in a painting made in 1937, Still Life with Old ...”

“... derives, however, from sketching expeditions Williams made in the hills, and once you are told to read it as a landscape, the squiggles as trees, the smudges as hills, you see it with more pleasure. In an etching, Circle Landscape, Upwey, in which the squiggles condense into a forested hillside, the flavour is Oriental. In others that show chopped trees or ...”

“... knowledge of, and evident affection for, Sayers’s fiction – the detective stories about Lord Peter Wimsey especially. And now, she comes forward with what will surely rank as the definitive biography of Sayers. It is not a book which contains any surprises for those of us who have read the previous ...”

“... at Berkeley in 1969; a trip to Poland in 1981; memories of a Catholic childhood; how he came to read Joyce; an introduction to his novel Small World; and his account of going to a Shakin’ Stevens concert in Birmingham. The second part is mostly reviews: of Norman Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex, The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J.D. Salinger, a ...”

“... What was Racine’s strategy here? It is perhaps a pity that Marin did not follow the lead of Peter France and discuss the tension in Racine (or Boileau) between loyalty and independence, the strategies of criticism or self-defence as well as the strategies of praise. Such an approach would free him from the danger of reductionism. There remains the ...”

“... woodcuts, engravings by Dürer, Ricketts and Pissarro. Above the fireplace are shelves of well-read books – apparently quite extraordinary books to judge by the title. Madam is very sweet, yet very cultured. Pissarro, hidden behind his beard and thick eyebrows, sat there enjoying everything so heartily and yet so quietly. There is something French in ...”