“... are to a large extent guesswork – apart from anything else, levels of alcohol consumption are self-reporting, so accurate figures for usage are hard to come by, especially among heavy drinkers with fucked-up health. In any case, doctors don’t believe what patients tell them about their boozing habits. The spiky British wine writer Andrew Barr told his ...”

“... some spontaneous emotional and intellectual reaction that has been only partly processed by self-conscious rationalisation. As Gran himself comments, with the passage of time ‘the memory of the hardship fades to leave the adventure bright and clear.’ A good diary should offer more than just ‘the adventure bright and clear’. One reason for ...”

“... richer, more intimate affair than, say, proportional representation; but the post-colonial critic Robert Young has recently reminded us of just what racist, imperial baggage this apparently suggestive notion carries with it from the anthropologising 19th century. Jacqueline Rose has her own suspicions of that brand of literary politics for which culture is ...”

“... was sparse (it ended at 15, if it ever really began), but he was a furious reader. He was always self-conscious about his peasant origins, and tried to drown them out with a noisy extravagance of opinion, and by proclaiming a Nietzschean aristocracy of spirit. From adolescence, he was obsessively determined to become a great writer; his late teens and ...”

“... and drift of his writing. This exacting requirement has been triumphantly met in a new work by Robert DeMaria, as original in conception as it is energetic in execution. More remarkably still, DeMaria has done this by means of a study of the Dictionary, a book so large and disparate as to have seceded from the jurisdiction of modern criticism. In the ...”

“... is alive. Jimi Hendrix is alive. Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and worldwide backing of one of ...”

“... the Wolfson Foundation and the British Government. I have condensed this latter-day story from Robert Knox’s 1992 monograph, which for the first time gives a detailed description of the whole Amaravati collection, including the pieces still in storage. The publication of Knox’s beautifully illustrated book, which builds on the work of a museum ...”

“... goes off on its own, creating its own object, a picture of itself rather than a prophecy. The bold self-portrait on the cover of Julian Symons’s excellent selection from Lewis’s work in a sense tells us all we need to know about his manner, which is a kind of distillation of Art Déco – fierce, highly-coloured, angular, ugly, but with a grotesque tactile ...”

“... note either this, or the military carriage, or the regulation side-whiskers, or ‘some amount of self-importance and a certain air of command’, or the manner in which the Marine held his head and swung his cane. As the Holmes saga developed, Conan Doyle came to see that it would be to the advantage of the stories that his readers should be afforded a clear ...”

“... used for desirable ends is certainly an extraordinarily unlikely eventuality and perhaps even a self-contradictory idea. Good nuclear weapons have to be weapons which are feared so deeply and so steadily that there is never a real danger of their being used. But weapons of which there is literally no danger of their being used cannot rationally be feared at ...”

“... you used to cook food or treat frost-bite. The tablets themselves represent another tribute to self-sufficiency. Writing on wood was common enough in the Greco-Roman world. Normally, to judge from the survivals and from the comments of their literary users, the flat surface of the tablet held a shallow central depression, which was filled with wax. Such ...”

“... funeral took place before the report came in, and, as the ceremony was ending, a man called Robert Burns – Shirley Ann’s uncle – took out a Beretta and shot the reverend three times in the head. There was no insurance, but Radney was quick to see fresh opportunities. Burns had done what half the town dreamed of doing, and few people wanted to see ...”

“... needless to say, no respectable woman was allowed backstage, where only the entitled male – a self-declared ‘connoisseur’ of women, whether as lecher, or in rare cases, as painter – might tread. These baroque rules explain some painted facts: Degas had the freedom to place his focus anywhere in the theatre, the viewer’s nose and eye one moment ...”

“... disappeared as it has been surrounded and overlaid by successive Chinese visions of the modern. Robert Barnett’s experience of Lhasa does not go back as far as the Dalai Lama’s memory: he first visited in 1987, as a tourist on a not very profound search for enlightenment. He never got to the cave where he had planned a week of meditation. Instead, on ...”

“... depiction of Cameron in The Death of the Heart (1938), make of the characterisation of himself as Robert, the crypto-Nazi spy whose loyalty his lover Stella is gradually forced to question as the story unfolds until, at the end, unmasked, he falls or jumps to his death from the roof of her house? Much of what Bowen put into her letters of what she wanted to ...”