“... like these form a substantial part of the Batoni exhibition at the National Gallery (until 18 May). It has not drawn great crowds. It is advertised by a portrait of Richard Milles, which is typical in its confident projection of the sitter’s position and the painter’s skills; it could be that hackles are raised by the prospect of a succession of ...”

“... perfumier, linen-trader, timber-merchant etc etc, and his extensive espionage work on behalf of Robert Harley, Defoe was an indefatigable writer. Peter Earle, in the introduction to The World of Defoe (1976), confesses the alarm he experienced when ‘with the contract signed, I began to realise just what I had let myself in for ... To my horror I ...”

“... with the resulting civilian death toll ‘conservatively estimated’ at 100,000. These figures may have come as an embarrassment to the editors of the Salisbury Review, who in 1987 published an inexcusable defence of Renamo by Jillian Becker. They may even have made the State Department sit up. While it has shrewdly ...”

“... Lecky and new-wave social science, the scatological treatment of Thomas Carlyle. Other omissions may be added. Frederic Maitland is not very well realised, which is strange given the historians (Kenyon among them) who believe in his greatness. Maitland’s relationship with Leslie Stephen and avid interest in Meredith’s novels would appear to be precisely ...”

“... is gradually revealed as he tells us with disgust about an American marketing executive with a Robert Redford moustache who is ordering Pimm’s in an irritating manner, spoiling the atmosphere of a pub which Croucher favours. This bounder is called Tony (Croucher’s least favourite name) and kisses a British girl ‘full on the lips’. This is ‘not ...”

“... or somebody – some murderer – like that. He had probably misread a communication from Robert (The Great Terror) Conquest. Anyway, it is already pretty clear that one of the chief excitements of this publication will be in finding out who has been dumped on, and how badly. Few well-known names escape the Larkin lash and although Anthony Thwaite ...”

“... nothing, but between power and power. This suggests that the landscape is more restricted than it may look. Two main views of international law currently circulate. One sees the limits of state obligation as drawn by self-interest: they’re taken to encompass a limited degree of altruism by citizens towards their compatriots, but not to extend as far as the ...”

“... heart of the Museum. His favourite seat is said to have been number L13.This last detail is not in Robert Henderson’s book, which leads me to wonder whether it’s wrong. Henderson, a former Russian curator at the British Library, knows everything there is to know about Lenin’s love affair with the BM, and tells it all. This is a level of detailed ...”

“... May the 24th is Bob Dylan’s 50th birthday. To anyone involved with Dylan in the mid-Sixties, say during his medicine-fuelled blaze with the Band through Australia and Europe in 1966, the fact that he is not only alive but still performing twenty-five years later must in itself seem utterly extraordinary. One of the key aspects of the Dylan myth during those roller-coaster years was that he wouldn’t be around much longer ...”

“... she left the company to take on other roles (thus initiating this correspondence) suggests she may have come to find it stifling. Pirandello scarcely separates her from himself; all his dreams are for their mutual triumph. ‘Now, in our case the true truth is this: that I am your true father, and that you are my creature, my creature, my creature, in ...”

“... would have let me walk into the RPG round. I wouldn’t have felt a thing.’ The primal Baggit may know the purple fields better than anyone, but, accordingly, he is least likely of all to adjust to civilian life. His end in the beauty parlour comes as no surprise to Hollywood, who realises that for someone that mean and tough there can be no permanent ...”

“... for it. In England, reputed ‘conjurors’ like John Dee, Thomas Hariot, William Warner and Robert Fludd were engaged in important transitional research in such areas as engineering, optics, cartography, pharmacy and metallurgy. They were early technologists, though still working within an animistic, non-scientific context. A formative influence here ...”

“... the doctors who supported the ‘new German science of healing’ at a meeting in Nuremberg in May 1935 did so because they opposed what they called ‘alienation from nature’. By the time David Brower turned up, a large segment of the Western world was ready for a practical and friendly philosophy prepared to make the best of technology and human ...”

“... have done, a life undivided by such a cataract. In his introduction to A crowd is not company, Robert Kee voices some similar thoughts about the experience of war in youth. In fact, the subject of his book is not so much ‘death, fear, hunger’, as the effects of a unique kind of confinement on a young middle-class Englishman of his generation ...”

“... of the entrepreneurial spirit to the rise of literary criticism. And yet it sounds so curious. We may worry about imports, like Henry Ryecroft, but we don’t infer morality from butter. We may worry about war, like Lord Salisbury, but we don’t infer rivalry between nations from a Darwinian rivalry between species. Those ...”