“... very angry if I am not. He told me that I could never accomplish anything important in life by my reading, while I could help him by being with him.’ Of course, he did not expect many men to match his intelligence, either. His time at Cambridge put him on terms with the great men of the period – McTaggart, Moore and his collaborator Whitehead – and he ...”

“... In Politics and the Pound, Philip Stephens has produced a book which should be required reading for anyone aspiring to be either Chancellor or Prime Minister. Let’s hope Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are studying it carefully. They can legitimately enjoy the more egregious mistakes made by the Tories since 1979, but they should be sparing with their scorn ...”

“... a Life which admits its heavy dependence on some determinedly ingenious exercises in biographical reading. ‘The story of Aphra Behn,’ she laments, ‘must be constructed from the works, for there is almost nowhere else to search.’ It’s just as well for her biographers, then, that Behn lived in such a colourful and otherwise well-documented ...”

“... with its provocative subtitle: ‘A Study of Music in Decline’. This was on my first Cambridge reading list, presumably because it wrote off a lot of the new music of the interwar years that Cambridge was still having difficulty coming to terms with in the early 1960s. But it was dangerous stuff for an 18-year-old brought up on the Anglican choral ...”

“... 1960 Williams was playing with Fenella Fielding in the revue Pieces of Eight (largely written by Peter Cook) at the Apollo Theatre, and his diary entry for the 27th reads: ‘The show in evening went well, till Madam decided to ad lib one line before the tag in “Spies”. Of course it threw me completely. This is the last straw. I’ve reported it to the ...”

“... in Suffolk on Day 167 of the Sizewell Inquiry. In the huge auditorium, indelibly associated with Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, Mr Justice Layfield presided over an inquiry the minutes of which were a lawyer’s dream. How they wallowed in it! Every detail of every pipe of every set of tubes seemed to be dissected. I came away doubting whether this form ...”

“... There’s more dash and novelty, but little more analysis, in the treatment accorded P.D. James, Peter Lovesey, Nicholas Freeling, Simenon, Chandler and the husband-and-wife team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Only one of the essays seems really ambitious, and the effect, I’m afraid, is comic. Eric Mottram – an otherwise much respected old friend of ...”

“... of sophistication, perception, wittiness, up-to-the-momentness, will reduce our powers of novel-reading repartee, as it were, to helpless silence. But we are wrong, fortunately. Amis is the kindest of novel-talkers in that he does always, and very considerately, wait for us to catch up and make – at least notionally – our own little point. This is just ...”

“... the language in which it is expressed had changed. You need to go back to contemporary texts, as Peter White did in his excellent Promised Verse (1993). The exact relationship of Horace, Maecenas and Augustus is quite tricky enough without having to read the details through a distorting lens. It might be worth adding that what are normally called the Odes ...”

“... in Christian belief, and this new book contains the chapter and verse of nearly a decade’s reading and musing. She attempts in it to trace the development of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, and the changes in approach to the problems the doctrine set in train, from early days to the 14th century. She is able to delineate one strong curve ...”

“... which still survived in the postwar Bethnal Green anthropologised by Michael Young and Peter Willmott in Family and Kinship in East London (1957). Davin’s respect for the resourcefulness, grit and loyalty of these working families is clear: the streets may have been mean but the locals weren’t. In all this the role of children was crucial. They ...”

“... speeches, deciphered telegrams sent between commissars, newspaper reports, protocols and so on. Reading the Tsar and Tsarina’s correspondence and diaries is not like reading Nicholas and Alexandra. Alexandra is preoccupied with what reads now as cutesy spiritualism and neurotic moralism; she is at once high-minded and ...”

“... and just a little wry. Epithets like ‘disenchanted’ come to mind. That is because I have been reading the latest of John Gage’s books, Colour in Art. Gage’s achievement, here and in Colour and Culture (1993) and its successor Colour and Meaning (1999), is to tinge colour with time like no writer before. His curious and scrupulous mind teases out ...”

“... and geographic borderlines’. The usual narrative of Surrealism, the curators argue, tends to peter out around 1939, when many European artists were forced to flee the coming war. With pieces from the 1920s to the 1980s, Surrealism beyond Borders blows right past this date, with the implication that, when it comes to such international movements, the ...”

“... may not deserve to be done away with entirely and forthwith. Cannadine’s attitude, on my reading of his book, is a little ambivalent. Most of the time, he seems to think the decline and fall both inexorable and well-deserved. He has great fun with the bungling spendthrifts who end up abroad in flight from their creditors, the appalling shits who go ...”