“... Despite a new paralysis – my back –Am stirred, perhaps, to mine the new resource,Put down my worn suitcases and unpack.[Publications]Reader, should I turn another page?Fly off to somewhere, maybe even worse?Or limp serenely into middle ageAnd try to flog this flimsy book of verse? [c/o Fig Tree PocketQldAustraliaphotopies ofrelevantdocumentati ...”

“... concerned the first glance is enough: For certain he takes soon what we might late. The rest of us may talk seductive guff Unendingly and not come up to snuff, Whereat we most obscenely fulminate. We say of her that she can’t pass a prick. We call him cunt-struck, stick-man, power tool, Muff-diver, stud, sack artist, motor dick, Getting his end away, dipping ...”

“... wit has scowled. We fume and Rupert Murdoch’s none the worse. And writing in this corset stanza may Be nothing more than flying in the face Of new technology. And now they’re topping Up the latest tank of history at Wapping – A metaphor is when you have one space To fill and all of life to file away. Most metaphor, as Kipling guessed when he Made ...”

“... from view in a sustained fit of unsociability such that you wonder whether the mailbox may not be a blind, put up outside someone else’s house in the hope of siphoning off unwanted communications from the outside world. Its latest appearance is as the jacket photograph on an odd compilation called Letters to J.D. Salinger (Wisconsin, £20.95), in ...”

“... Moon and brought back the stones. What does change is humanity and his thinking.’ Whatever that may mean exactly, you would not gather from it how nicely tied and labelled the stones were. The stamps, franking and address are like a footnote in a page of Saul Steinberg’s The Passport, the whole item as elegant as one of the examples of traditional ...”

“... When, in May, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson gives up his role as Tory MP for the Spectator to take over from Michael Heseltine as the editor of Henley-on-Thames, you have to wonder where they’re going to find someone sufficiently blond to be his successor at Doughty Street (from which sturdy address the organ Johnson currently oversees emerges each week ...”

“... strong gust, one imagines, will deck the lot of them. It’s Pilger’s hope that these pictures may ‘offer inspiration to a new generation of eyewitness photographers’. But Reporting the World is also a tribute to his editors – the nurturers and tough guys, authorisers of fantastic foreign travel tabs – who had the trust of their proprietors, or the ...”

“... tactics and challenge the counsel of the court’s Portuguese Catholic advisers. While Clavell may have overstated his historical significance, Adams was one of Ieyasu’s close confidants. He was made a samurai and given an estate in modern-day Yokosuka, south of Tokyo. In 1613, when an East India Company expedition arrived in Japan, Adams was sent to ...”

“... he wanted, we’d have been, like so many Philip Larkins, the less deceived. Some of his readers may wonder, however, why a chief press secretary did not resign like his predecessor if he felt he was being sidelined at a moment – such as now – when a government should have sufficient trust in the mature reactions of its citizens to spin out less ...”

“... seem, is wisely making contingency plans in the event of Abolition. But I digress. The Prince may be short, but it clearly isn’t short enough for today’s cheese magnates. A new edition, turbo-entitled Power, is now available (Profile, £2.99). Weighing in at a mere 46g, and measuring only 15 x 10 x 0.6 cm3, it will slip effortlessly into a breast ...”

“... steel, pearl dimensions. Cézanne: ‘We are an iridescent chaos.’ * Balcony over Lexington, May evening, fog wreath’d towers, gothic dome lit from within, monument of our aspirations turned hollow, abandoned somehow. And later, in the florist’s window on Second Avenue, a queen’s display of orchid and fern, lush heap of dried sheaves, bounty of ...”

“... undermining his ‘Saddam was a bad man’ justification for going to war in Iraq – suggests he may have recently become more of a realpolitiker). In the last Tintin adventure that Hergé completed, Tintin et les Picaros (1976), Tintin – by this time an almost insufferable prig – helps his old friend General Alcazar reclaim power in San Theodoros from ...”

“... escape was vanishingly rare, rather than the norm. The game is hard to come by these days, and it may anyway be time for something more contemporary: ‘Escape from Guantanamo’, perhaps, though to make it worth playing it would need a few extra inauthentic details – the possibility of escape, say, or getting a fair trial if you roll a double six. One ...”

“... roughly a third of which appeared in two recent issues of the London Review (15 April and 20 May), is to be published in its entirety in September by the Waywiser Press. In his obituary of Wollheim in the Independent last November, John Richardson wrote that Germs – which Wollheim thought ‘the best piece of work’ he had ‘ever done’ – ‘must ...”

“... ask why), it was all a bit of a shambles, as Censorinus makes delightfully clear. Be that as it may, the sad fact remains that however I try to fiddle it, I don’t share a birthday with Caesar. Time to give up those plans of conquering ...”