“... Procedures Manual’, an attempt to codify both Hughes’s memoranda and the instructions set down by his compliant lieutenants. Its guidelines for employees, generously quoted in Barlett and Steele’s 1979 biography of Hughes, are extremely precise. They range from general conduct (‘Do not fraternise with persons outside the office ... Tell your wife as ...”

“... Virgin and Child with angels: the Chellini roundel from the museum’s own collection and one lent by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In the first, the drapery has countless small, wriggling folds resembling a heap of tangled string. In the second, the folds flow gracefully and clarify form; an angel’s tunic is gently lifted ...”

“... and entertaining contributions. Hugh Trevor-Roper discusses the origins of Scottish kitsch; David Cannadine the (not at all remote) origins of British royal ritual; other contributions concern British rule in India and Welsh cultural identity (treated more respectfully than Trevor-Roper treats poor old Scotland). Eric Hobsbawm both introduces and ...”

“... Jonathan Meades​ is the Jonathan Meades of our generation,’ reads a puff-quote by the late A.A. Gill on the cover of Meades’s new cookbook, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen (Unbound, £20), but it’s hard to think of any patch less in need of a Jonathan Meades than English food writing. Perhaps this wasn’t the case when Meades was writing his restaurant column for the Times in the 1980s and 1990s, when food culture deserved the inventively digressive broadsides he continues to direct at English blindspots – modernist architecture, provincial glamour, France – in his excellent television programmes ...”

“... Some things​ in the relations between authors and publishers never change. Dear Mr Murray, edited by David McClay (John Murray, £16.99), a collection of letters written to six generations of the Murray family, is full of familiar complaints. Jane Austen was ‘very much disappointed … by the delays of the printers ...”

“... one-sentence paragraph: ‘1. The woman is the first to give him trouble, followed soon afterwards by the man.’ We might suppose ‘him’ to be the story’s main character, but the second paragraph makes clear that he is in fact the writer, who is inviting us to share in his creative process, to track the movements of ...”

“... or: ‘How many of the 1964 West Ham cupwinning team had names beginning with a B?’ Or it would be: ‘Pick an XI in which every position is taken by a Gary. I will start you off. Gary Bailey in goal. Gary Stevens right back. Now you carry on.’ Yes, truly boring. But in those days soccer-mania was dark and lonely ...”

“... honours the loonies of London. It seems there are more of them every year, especially since – by one of the more perverse acts of enlightenment – the asylums were emptied in the Seventies. One sees the London mad everywhere in the streets and parks: ranters, mutterers, arm-wavers. The quieter cases are charitably allowed into the public bars of seedy ...”

“... and a rationalist, who never lost his equilibrium.’ Rationality, we are invited to conclude, may be good for you in doses but can wither the spirit; beyond a certain point its study becomes the province of moral pathology. It has not always been thought so, but there would be few dissenters nowadays. So when ...”

“... themselves and the purpose of their journey, but we suspect them of lying. They are an odd set, by the standards of both 1736 and 1985. The leader of the party calls himself Mr Bartholomew, but later in the story we shall find him described as ‘his Lordship’. In his room at the inn, this young man fills his glass from a blue-and-white decanter of ...”

“... Must social policy be boring? After all, economic policy still keeps people awake while the phoney war between neo-Keynesians and monetarists lasts. Political policy (sit venia verba) continues to excite the adherents and opponents of adversary politics. Educational policy naturally interests the new educational class which dominates the journals and the universities ...”

“... arguments over the tactics and strategy of the Western Front, initiated during the war itself by the conflicts of ‘Easterners’ versus ‘Westerners’, and continued thereafter in the battles of the memoirs, were renewed after the Second World War by the defenders and detractors of Douglas Haig: arguments which for ...”

“... The US literary world can be divided into two camps: those who think Thomas Pynchon is a very clever guy, and those who also think he’s a great writer. As it happens, I’m of the former camp. While I admit that Pynchon’s writing is packed with all sorts of ideas, ultimately the novels strike me as more crudités than smorgasbord: the appetisers keep coming (and coming, and coming), but the main course never arrives ...”

“... few thousand dollars for a small vial, different versions of this indispensable elixir are hawked by laboratory supply companies the world over. Many of these products’ consumers have long been aware that there is a human story behind HeLa’s blandly commercialised ubiquity; now Rebecca Skloot’s remarkable book has appeared to fill in all the ...”

“... the arts world . . . A strange sound was heard . . . The Arts Minister was being praised. By ‘Arts Minister’ he presumably means Chris Smith, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, rather than Alan Howarth, the Arts Minister and ex-Tory, but you can hardly blame Lord Bragg for his confusion: when Smith took over the post from ...”