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“... Steve Bannon​ doesn’t like him. Before the conclave, he named Cardinal Robert Prevost as ‘one of the dark horses’ to become the next pope. ‘Unfortunately, he’s one of the most progressive,’ Bannon added. It is unlikely that Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, who had objected to Pope Francis and wants a return to a more traditional Catholicism, has much time for him either ...”

“... them. To be fair, not all the faces are dull. Some of the later portraits, for example that of Mrs Robert Sandilands, remind you that projection of character – they almost bring David to mind – can be achieved without Gainsborough-style feathered brushwork, or Hals-style slashes. Batoni, like many portrait painters with other strings to their bow, believed ...”

“... The welfare state became the warfare state – an outcome Roosevelt neither foresaw nor desired. Robert Dallek is troubled by the absence of leadership in contemporary American politics, and his biography of FDR is meant to show us what the real thing looks like. ‘In this time of demoralisation,’ he writes, ‘it seems well to remind Americans that the ...”

“... morning, lying there with a broken neck.Millay rose to fame while still in her twenties. She beat Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens for the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Although she became a proselytiser in her last decade, devoted to progressive causes to which she fitted her verses (‘not poems, posters,’ she admitted), she was still in demand for lectures and ...”

“... a cake and a Bible to Tehran to discuss an arms-for-hostages trade with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Robert MacNamara went to a briefing on Cuba believing that it was more than likely that he would not live through the weekend. The Central Intelligence Agency was caught, in collusion with the Mafia, plotting to poison Fidel Castro’s cigars. Ronald Reagan’s ...”

“... tenth anniversary of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership. Studying Mr Major’s ‘effect’ is, however, self-evidently more difficult. Whatever one thinks of Mrs Thatcher she was undoubtedly a larger-than-life figure who, one way or another, dominated her cabinet and party. Furthermore, in 1989, though it was clear the whole enterprise was going wildly off the ...”

“... and by no means as radical as some of those she appointed to run the Church would have wished. Robert Whiting’s book assesses the impact of all these changes in the parishes. His is a study of the religion of ordinary people in Devon and Cornwall. Meticulous and thorough, the fruit of years of reflection and hard work in the archives, it suffers from a ...”

“... not come back. In the first poem in My Alexandria, ‘Demolition’, Doty invokes the ghost of Robert Lowell: many of the poems take their bearings from Lowell’s clotted diction, from what Doty calls his ‘ruthless energy’, from Lowell’s interest in burning the poem onto the page, heaping on adjectives to fuel the fire, invoking the Old ...”

“... with Fouquet’s Agnès Sorel as the Virgin, where the sitter’s globular white breast thrusts it-self provocatively out at the viewer above a tightly-laced bodice; and with Grünewald’s green, twisted, lacerated body of Christ on the Cross, which, since it figured suffering and Christianity, both outside the pale in my progressive Jewish family, I ...”

“... to devise poses. One may also feel that there is something ‘stagey’ about some of his early self-portraits and about some of his early action-filled paintings such as the Belshazzar’s Feast in the National Gallery. It is, however, hard to believe that this was intended. And anything less like a ‘studio event’ than the Woman taken in Adultery or ...”

“... it: these 1200 pages of Amis Letters are merely a ‘selection’, we are told). Instead of direct self-disclosure, we get yards of leering porn – mostly to do with what lesbian schoolgirls might, or should, get up to – and a certain amount of sexual note-comparing. The two young would-be shaggers routinely swap updates on this or that girlfriend ...”

“... and assiduous, here is a thoroughly decent book. It has none of the sleazy sanctimony of Robert Sencourt’s biography, or the vanity of T.S. Matthews’. That it is a feat to be without spite is coincidentally manifested by the appearance of Geoffrey Grigson’s Recollections. Grigson’s jacket proffers, as a representative gnome: ‘I never heard ...”

“... his outlay of compassion, squandering now, though, less care on the universe than on himself. Self-pity became his constant theme. In place of the rather studied, substanceless, arabesque contortions of the early verse, Berryman offered vital human drama – either his own or that of his serviceable alter ego,‘Henry’. The improvement in readability is ...”

“... his life thereafter. Browne goes so far as to compare his Kentish country house, Down, to a ‘self-contained, self-regulating scientific ship methodically ploughing onwards through the waves outside . . . almost as if he were on the Beagle again, sailing into some unknown port, where people felt it was a natural ...”

“... the unfortunate Wordsworth, who presided over ‘moderate anarchy’ until the Prime Minister, Robert Peel, came to the rescue of his old school by installing him as a canon of Westminster). But Tyerman suggests that more often than not the governors, staff and boys (or some combination of the three) were glad to see the back of any incumbent Head, even ...”