“... knew a thing or two about lachrymose tat, dismissed Wilson’s book as a ‘syrupy dish for young sentimentalists’. Wilson had the review suppressed and a puff inserted in its place. What is most remarkable about Wilson’s literary output is that he produced his vast and varied body of work while holding down the most prestigious humanities ...”

“... to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules ... No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.’ It doesn’t come off here and Ackroyd shouldn’t have done it. The most informative of the interludes is the sixth, where Ackroyd the novelist cross-examines Ackroyd the biographer. ‘Are ...”

“... translators are forced to rephrase the passage, to suggest an internal condition. For example, David Grene, whose translation is used in most American universities: ‘My body, too, has felt this thrill of pain.’ After reading Ruth Padel, one would understand, even if one did not know a word of Greek, that the women of Troezen were describing Phaedra’s ...”

“... If​ you are British and no longer young, the title for a brand new Philip Larkin poem is liable to enter your head at least once a day. This morning it was ‘Order of Service’. It’s not as good as ‘High Windows’ or ‘Dockery and Son’, but it has the same doleful ebb. Searching in an old folder, I found an order of service for Larkin’s memorial at Westminster Abbey on 14 February 1986 ...”

“... condition’ and simply delighting us with its colour and substance, like an eye-catching dessert. David Sylvester described looking at a painting by Auerbach at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1956 as like ‘running our fingertips over the contours of a head near us in the dark, reassured by its presence, disturbed by its otherness’.By including the work of so ...”

“... of the church, the rise of intolerance, the spirit of the Crusades – blame it on Constantine. David Potter punctures this inflated image. This doesn’t mean he cuts Constantine down to size: far from it. Potter has done something far more difficult. He has examined, with gusto and an unrivalled mastery of detail, the aspects of Constantine neglected by ...”

“... at MoMA again (until 14 May). At the time the show opened, Rivera was acknowledged, along with David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco, as a leader of Mexican muralism, which was supported by the new government of Alvaro Obregón as a way to promote a transformed sense of Mexican identity through public art. This new identity would yoke an ...”

“... the truth. He had to think. ‘Cars an ‘that,’ he added at last. Digger Keen and Vic Curran, young Australian volunteers taken prisoner by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore, are held for a while in an amusement park called The Great World. The real Great World, as it exists in Digger’s understanding, is, like the park, an imperfect ...”

“... flagrant, and he is trying – with a big-headed modesty all his own – to explain why a glorious young person like Rebecca West should have wanted to throw herself at a man with an ageing, scrawny, consumptive body. He describes the mechanics of human relationships in a way that leaves him empty of personal charm, but also generates a suspicion that the ...”

“... sense of humour’: a phenomenon everyone considers to be distinctive but no one can define. As David Stubbs writes in Different Times, his impressive survey of British comedy on stage, radio, film and television, ‘it’s not so much a case of Britain producing comedy as comedy producing Britain.’ The book provides a good opportunity to look at our ...”

“... the past, would-be biographers have been discouraged from poking their noses into the business of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy ...”

“... to grit its teeth and dig in its heels.’ In his 1951 campaign to ‘liquidate Stone’ (the young historian Lawrence Stone), he composed what was later described as ‘one of the most vitriolic attacks ever made by one historian on another’. Victims constantly used the word ‘malicious’ about his choice of language, and Trevor-Roper himself often ...”

“... TV channel Russia Today solicited the views of Annie Machon – ex-MI5 agent, ex-partner of David Shayler and current 9/11-truther – and she came up with a conspiracy theory of her very own: ‘Hardline factions within the American administration,’ she surmised, ‘egged on the FBI to try and get them to come up with this result because of the need ...”

“... Of all the many tributes to Michael Foot it was David Cameron who hit the nail on the head. He was, Cameron said, ‘almost the last link to a more heroic age in politics’. In appearance, and demeanour, Foot resembled an Old Testament prophet. An impression which, in later life, his shock of white hair, the passion of his delivery and the magnificence of his rhetoric served only to enhance ...”

“... of Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration might look like? Turn to Ingres’s portrait of Amédée-David, Comte de Pastorait – ‘a promising bureaucrat’ under Napoleon who, by 1826, when the portrait was painted, had become Conseiller d’Etat Extraordinaire. His black uniform, brilliantly set off by the red ribbon and white enamel star of the Légion ...”