“... Levy’s latest book, a collection of his newspaper articles, reveals the man once dubbed ‘King Foodie’ in all his fullness. He is – and he knows it – a mild snob and a name-dropper, bumptious, provocative, opinionated and flippant. But there is even more to Levy than meets the eye. Behind the facetiousness, there is genuine wit, as in his ...”

“... face and then drawing from it: the Librarian, for example. Our new sculptors – Edward Allington, David Mach, Tony Cragg – give us the set-up pure and simple. There are 21 articles in this book, one of which samples a further 16 texts. Those by Sven Alfons, R.J.W. Evans, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, and Piero Falchetta are the most useful, as they enable the ...”

“... stories as words are at conveying pictures. An observer who had not already heard the story of David and Goliath would see in the Speculum picture nothing more specific than a king who has just cut off the head of a giant (the latter identified not so much by his size as by his club). Indeed, even if one does already ...”

“... notes on how the votes were going to be cast. He was described by one opponent as ‘Warwick the king-maker’, and those who wished to advance their careers certainly felt it necessary to keep on good terms with him. In the volumes under review the young John Constable makes several appearances. Farington gave him good advice about not taking a dead-end job ...”

“... of annotating any Paterian text. The general editors of the new Oxford edition, Lesley Higgins and David Latham, have embarked on the project with bravura: ‘The ten volumes of The Collected Works of Walter Pater are commissioned to serve scholars as the definitive edition for at least as long as the unscholarly 1910 Library Edition has served.’ Volumes III ...”

“... presence of the Israeli leader, there was Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO leader, holding hands with the king of Jordan (both are Israeli supplicants). Sarkozy, placed in the fourth row, quickly began his own long march to the front, but by the time he got there the cameras had disappeared and the celebs soon followed suit. How many turned up in all? A million was ...”

“... lawyer Pat Finucane has prompted MI5 to release documents which may well lead to a public inquiry. King Abdullah has been exposed egging on the US to attack Iran. The Libyan government’s threat of dire retribution if Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi died in jail in Scotland concentrated the mind of the UK envoy in Tripoli, who was already talking of his release as ...”

“... subject: ‘“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice. “I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too!”’ We notice that Holt has begun to turn his deep question in an unexpected direction. ‘Why is there something rather than nothing, because there is, and we’d better ...”

“... as well as more representative of the state of 16th-century history: Natalie Zemon Davis, David Cressy, Eamon Duffy. More privately, there is the story he tells us in his prologue about his acceding, if sheepishly, to the unspoken wishes of his dead father by saying Kaddish for him. Which seems a more human response than his refusal, recorded in the ...”

“... in 2010, isn’t present. After a Saturday bullfight in Valladolid, I went to Tordesillas with David Penton, secretary of the Club Taurino of London. He is something of a hero there for his defence of the toro de la vega, the bête noire of the anti-bullfighting lobby. There was to be a parade lit by lanterns that evening, and a toro de la vega on ...”

“... to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking relish. Gossip has its charms, but not when it’s dragged out over three interminable evenings with animated postcard footage re-used to the point of ...”

“... stratified and ossified that it required six generations of nobility to be allowed to follow the king’s hunt. A petition to be received at Versailles was turned down on the grounds that a member of the vicomte’s family had been found to have usurped their title in 1667.Joséphine, too, was rebuffed in her early attempts to restyle herself for life in ...”

“... about the links between the political and cultural histories of the USA during this period, but David Stowe, who teaches American Thought and Language at Michigan State University, is, to my knowledge, the first writer to have attempted a systematic history of the relationship between jazz and New Deal America. The most immediate impact of Roosevelt’s ...”

“... But he put back George II’s dislocated thumb when the licensed physicians were all telling the King he had gout and was just going to have to put up with it. The third of Hogarth’s ‘undertakers’, John ‘Chevalier’ Taylor (1703-72), seems to have been an evident crook, who boasted of his success at seducing patients, talked what he called the ...”

“... Just under forty years ago David Erdman provided for William Blake historical contexts in abundance in Blake: Prophet against Empire (1954). It was a remarkable work of literary detection, which still dominates the field. Some Blake readers have felt that his attribution of correspondence between text and contemporaneous events was over-literal (as well as hazardous), and Jon Mee is one of these ...”