“... State Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, then quickly painted over by order of its commissioner, Robert Moses, might disagree on that last point.‘Myth and literature have imagined what can be neither known nor decided’ in law, so Heller-Roazen often resorts to fiction. Law drops the missing person once his case is closed by return or death, but myth and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... between this foreign policy crisis and domestic democratic politics. That is the main concern of Robert Crowcroft’s new book, but there may also be broader lessons, of relevance to Britain’s present predicament. A core assumption of those who write about the ‘appeasement’ crisis has always been that it does indeed hold broader ...”

“... and formal procedures, reading resolutions and exegeses that explained, in the characteristic self-satisfied tone of Soviet bureaucratic documentation, that the wise decisions of the Party’s Central Committee and Council of Ministers had been duly disseminated, hailed by the public, and implemented. At the same time, he was making friends in ...”

“... If you were​ throwing a pity party among American playwrights, the antisocial, alcoholic, self-dramatising misery named Eugene Gladstone O’Neill would win the door prize. At the age of 21, already making a myth of his sense of doom, O’Neill was calling himself ‘the Irish luck kid’. By then, he’d been thrown out of Princeton (‘Ego’ was his nickname), fathered a son with his divorced first wife, caught syphilis in his wanderlust around South America as a merchant seaman, and attempted suicide in a Greenwich Village fleabag called ‘the Hell Hole’ by its permanently pie-eyed denizens ...”

“... Charmian (an ‘infantile’ mate-woman, as Stone portrayed her), and ultimately to suicide from a self-administered overdose of morphine. Stone based his suicide thesis on interviews and on some alleged notes by the dying man’s bed. ‘Uremia’, Stone alleged, was a cover-up by Charmian and her pliant doctors. Stone’s Sailor on Horseback remains both ...”