“... century, created a series of portraits of Mary Magdalene as a contemporary great lady, sitting reading or playing the lute (examples by the same artist showing her with pen, ink, ruler, sand caster and blotter – surely some of the earliest depictions of a woman writing – are sadly not included). The striking Salon group portrait by Jean Béraud, La ...”

“... scandalous … He has made a will leaving them to me plus £500.’ In the end they were left to Peter Coats, Channon’s boyfriend of many years, who allowed the publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with ...”

“... of caviar are available all year round.‘People are gaining more confidence in sushi,’ said Peter Morrison, Manager, Trading Division. ‘We have joined forces with very credible traders such as Yo! Sushi and we aim to educate customers by bringing them here.’ Alison handed me a cup of liquid grass from the fresh juice bar, Crussh. There was something ...”

“... draw a crowd anywhere in any country, but they come to watch the performance rather than to hear a reading. He no longer strips off as he was likely to do in youth or early middle age, but when doing a tour with Bob Dylan he suggested that they should be filmed together in bed, talking about ‘ecology, capitalism, communism, God, poetry, meditation and ...”

“... and more plentiful. ‘O God the bottomless tedium of Dostoevsky ... his Russian salad-ness, his Peter-the-Great-would-have-loved-it-ness, his Catharine-loved-being-whipped-why-shouldn’t-you-ness at all times, his lead-me-to-the-Urals-ness, his Hells-eggs-why-aren’t-you-terrified-ness – he is too interested in the reader to be a good writer.’ There ...”

“... when the intimate doings of the royal family may not have been uppermost in people’s minds. Reading the reissue of The Little Princesses, a simpler explanation for what Wilson calls the ‘cocoon of unknowability’ comes to mind. The life of the House of Windsor in the days when it wasn’t ever thus, was like the soup of the day, so appropriately ...”

“... roll-call of radical Jewish dissent extends from Adorno and Benjamin through Kafka and Lukacs to Peter Weiss and Arnold Zweig. But his argument simplifies a more complex problem. His generalisations about Jewish trouble-makers would apply almost equally well to a Catholic like Heinrich Böll, a Marxist like Brecht or a feminist like Christa ...”

“... Kakadu Variations for piano trio): but who today has heard of Bernard Anselm Weber’s Deodata, Peter von Winter’s Das Unterbrochene Opferfest, Friedrich von Drieberg’s Don Tacagno, Friedrich Himmel’s Fanchon, Anton Fischer’s Das Hausgesinde or Carl Ludwig Hellwig’s Die Bergknappen? One opera that prompted an unusually long review was ...”

“... baggage flows on from novel to novel: Japanese netsuke, flying saucers, electricity failure. The Peter Pan motif recurs, with a pop-song variation on words from Barrie’s own childhood: ‘It’s only me.’ Lots of women – this is bafflingly typical of Iris Murdoch – are in love with George and Rozanov: as ever, the least attractive of her men get the ...”

“... is a transsexual, but the suggestion is that she wants to conform to society and can’t, just as Peter Pan, as Barrie finally admitted to himself, wanted to grow up, but couldn’t. Women are treated in The Well without much sympathy, and almost always as empty-headed. The whole book supports the view that men are naturally superior, which is why Stephen ...”

“... much much worse.’ Yes much much worse. As literature, that is – or perhaps one should say as reading matter. Reviewing Peter Manso’s Mailer, Elizabeth Hardwick went into the question, moral and aesthetic, of the taped book. The genre, with Mayhew as its godfather, began with the best intentions. ‘The sequential ...”

“... to follow. The same could not be said of Penrose and Courtiour’s The Pencourt File (1978) or Peter Chippindale and David Leigh’s The Thorpe Committal (1979), the latter being straightforward court reporting of the Minehead committal proceedings. The authors do not waste much time on the South African connection, though it seems clear that in 1974-5 ...”

“... had pulled herself up, and her husband down, to grade 19 (‘The lowest stratum of the reading public’); a revealing report on the limited post-war aspirations of girls doing wartime factory work (‘It’s not so much what’s going to happen to us, as what’s going to happen to the men who come home. Will there be jobs for them?’); and ...”

“... that source: deflected by Auden’s idiom towards psychological theorising, he allows the poem to peter out with talk of how ‘the lonely and unpopular’ can rediscover at the museum ‘the landscapes of their childhood’; the attraction of the Pitt-Rivers is reduced to nostalgia for dusty childhood boxrooms. When he attempts a similar accumulation of ...”

“... of the various literary pieces Cage wrote and published between 1973 and 1978, and it makes dismal reading. Fey, rambling, un-self-critical, Cage betrays the weakness that afflicts so many who set themselves up as father-figures – the habit of gurulity. As it happens, very little of this book is concerned with music, but what is is stunningly banal. There is ...”