“... moral simplicities prove ambiguous or uncertain. The two heraldic supporters of Gertrude are first Peter, known as the Count, a Polish refugee, friend and former colleague of Guy; and Anne, college friend of Gertrude, recently emerged from 14 years in a convent. The Count is the only possible candidate for the ‘soldier’ of the title, and he becomes so only ...”

“... bought by the family ‘just in case’ – they usually have no idea how to send a text. So Peter Mandelson wasn’t referring to them when he went on TV in May to press for the part-privatisation of the Royal Mail, saying that figures were down due to competition from emails and texts.I spluttered into my tea when I heard him say that. ‘Figures are ...”

“... May 1982, even if their owner Rupert Murdoch so wished – which he emphatically doesn’t. Peter Riddell of the Financial Times has taken an educated interest, but he is also in the House of Commons Lobby, and you cannot expect Lobby journalists to allow themselves to be perceived as part of a campaign. Paul Foot of the Mirror writes as pungently as ...”

“... Before​ I embarked on Eley Williams, of whom I had read nothing and knew nothing, I flipped through Attrib., her first book of stories. Even on first flip, I got a sense of something I sometimes find in things I like and that seem good to me, something that subliminally distinguishes writing that is careful and alive: a kind of alphabetical justice, to give this sheepish and probably disreputable thing a name in public ...”

“... from his Utopia. Even so, it had been Erasmus who had given him letters to friends such as Peter Giles, dedicatee of Utopia, in Antwerp and it was Erasmus who saw to the publication of Lucian, the epigrams and Utopia, bustling about to secure commendatory letters and so enhance them. Erasmus also coined and disseminated the description ‘a man for all ...”

“... and indulgent of a few quite particular locales and their architectural attractions. It has always read as if it would rather be titled A Guide to the Architecture of NW1. The structural approach that Jones and Woodward take in dividing up London is almost comic in its refusal to accommodate the city’s districts as they are actually experienced and lived ...”

“... having fictitious elements.’ That seems clear enough, and certainly covers an article recently read called ‘The Myth of President Kennedy’, which says that the assassinated idol of the Western world was little more, though certainly no less, than a rampant penis. The number and variety of his sexual activities (remarkable in view of his back ...”

“... conversation. ‘Oh, the jokes,’ she said at once. It is rather sad that these letters, read in bulk, might serve to confirm Harold Nicolson’s feline judgment on Nancy Mitford: ‘She is essentially not an intellectual and there is a sort of Roedean hoydenishness about her which I dislike.’ I did not dislike her by the end of the book, but it ...”

“... aiming at critical profundity, a lively, vigorous and intelligent commentator on all that he has read. Fifty European Novels begins with Rabelais and ends with Pasternak. It includes discussion of novels in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian. It can be read with enjoyment, and most English readers ...”

“... I happened to read Michael Barber’s rather off-beat and amusing biography of Anthony Powell while waiting for a delayed easyJet flight from Stansted to Belfast and enduring all the usual privations of short-haul, low-cost flying: being shunted from gate to gate, and from sky-blue-upholstered departure lounge to sky-blue-upholstered departure lounge; and being jostled, and jostling, on this occasion in the very burly company of the young men and women of the Scottish Gymnastics Display Team, and an elderly couple, both in wheelchairs, and a man tattooed from neck to wrist, and possibly lower, who was working his way loudly through a large box of Quality Street ...”

“... decades. Lleshanaku is hardly new on the international scene (in 2011, in Finland, as one could read in the magazine Guernica, a Slovak poet settled in Mexico was hearing her praises sung by a poet from Iran – this is how things happen in poetry), but she is new to me. Her combination of plain-spokenness and intelligence would have been welcome at any ...”

“... the explanations of scenes depicted in stone or paint on the sides of temples. More recently, they read it in India’s version of Classic Comics (the Amar Chitra Katha series) or saw it in the hugely successful televised version, 94 episodes, based largely on the comic book; the streets of India were empty (or as empty as anything ever is in India) during the ...”

“... cops, intelligent strippers with hearts of gold: a generically complacent agenda. But good fun to read from a few thousand miles away. You don’t have to worry, at that distance, about suspending disbelief. You’re happy to swallow an ex-state governor called Skink Tyree, a Vietnam vet liberal, who chooses to live on road kills, a swamp rat whose ...”

“... a secular one, and represents nothing more than the religious yearning of a non-religious age. Peter Ackroyd’s dignified, often eloquent biography offers a picture of More which is a combination of Catholic admiration and scholarly determinism. Ackroyd has soaked himself in late medieval history; happily, he does not pretend to conduct a historical ...”

“... now it’s an age of smooth men, of judgments based on appearance. Commentators are quick to read the signs, the measured droop of Lord Bragg’s handkerchief, the precise organisation of Tony Blair’s latest consensus hair policy, Lord Archer’s ironic, pre-penitentiary crop, the way Andrew Motion carries off his loden coat as he swirls between taxi ...”