“... was still hot’ is the wonderfully happy last line of Wild Things, when, after years of rumpus as King of the Wild Things far away, Max finds his supper waiting in his room. But illustrating the Grimm story Dear Mili, discovered in 1983, Sendak offers little comfort. An unpleasant epitome of the genre, and especially of Wilhelm Grimm’s morbid taste, Dear ...”

“... snobbish about its Dutch origins and its tulip festival, and named after our least successful king, James II, when he was Duke of York and Albany. One year, when I told friends in Manhattan that I was going to Albany to hear the hippy, marijuana-influenced poems of a Londoner who was living with another poet, half-Negro and half-Cherokee, the New York ...”

“... Will not reign long as Amnesty’s new chief. Placed under stress he has been known to warp, As David Astor points out with some grief. I must say that Thorpe’s nerve gives cause to gawp. A decent silence should not be so brief. One does feel he might wear more sober togs And do things quietly in aid of dogs. Marcus Aurelius said there’s an age ...”

“... in the dark subterranean car-park. Under my third-floor balcony a swimming-pool posed for a David Hockney painting, the water the colour of Paul Newman’s eyes, though it was deemed too cold to be usable in ‘winter’. (Appropriately enough, I had met Hockney during my previous visit to LA, through my artist brother. His brother was there ...”

“... who gained international notoriety, mostly through celebrated trials: Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, David Hilliard, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Ericka Huggins, Elaine Brown. But rather than focusing on the sensationalist and salacious aspects of the party’s history – the confrontations, violence, criminality – Bloom and Martin choose to recount ...”

“... knew that the woman acting ‘the pious widow’ was ‘also a hoofer, always happy to show a king a bit of leg’. Incongruity and bracing anachronism are Griffiths’s favourite tricks. Shakespeare’s antique-seeming language in Troilus and Cressida is like our manufacture of ‘distressed pine’ or ‘stone-washed jeans’. When Thersites uses ...”

“... in her diaries. 1 July 1939: ‘Jojo, thin, only 120 lbs, but very good. I read a chapter of David Copperfield a day to him, explaining points of conduct, geography, history, character, ethics, etc, and it seems a means of awakening him to realities.’ 7 February 1940: Jojo is ‘better than I ever knew him – in the thrill to his mind his walk changed ...”

“... of aristocratic families in decline, who retained pretentions to mighty connections (such as King John Sobieski) even as they subsided into ruin. His father Jan Norwid died in a debtors’ prison, and his mother died when he was only four. The Polish youth of the period was devoted to plotting and to fantasies of vengeance. In secret ...”

“... critic, but brought to life by him as skilfully as is the even more unpromising Leviticus by David Damrosch. Damrosch begins: ‘Perhaps the greatest problem facing students of the Bible as literature is the fact that so much of the Bible is not literature at all’ – a thought which will occur to most of the few readers Leviticus possesses, and which ...”

“... have heard’). ‘Barbara,’ Edmund Wilson decided, ‘is really a bad lot’: so bad that when David Pryce-Jones came to write his memoir of Connolly he thought it best to say nothing about her at all. On the other hand, it is part both of her disobliging character and its attraction that in compiling her own memoirs she does nothing to minimise her ...”

“... patrician of next-century information capitalism, Gates has been talking to everyone, including David Letterman, about what the future – guided by Microsoft, its controlling partner – has in store. With his transformation into a Third Wave Pollyanna, Chairman Bill is sounding remarkably like Speaker Newt, and his new book The Road Ahead has much in ...”

“... the Protestant Irish, landowners, protectionists, the City, much of the Church of England and King George V. No Labour Government, not even Attlee’s, faced such a coalition. There was, of course, an unintended element to this; but it was the inevitable outcome of a strategy which originated with Gladstone and was continued by his successors: that you ...”

“... says admiringly. Hundreds if not thousands of books came back across the Channel, of which (says David Dumville) maybe eleven can be identified. One of the books imported was an enormous Old Latin Bible from Cassiodorus’s Vivarium. It has not survived, but served as a format-model for the great Codex Amiatinus written at the twin foundations of ...”

“... because – as is becoming customary (see the books on Britain’s later colonial wars by Saul David) – neither author romanticises his subject to any great degree. Both are good on the daily lives of 18th and early 19th-century soldiers, and on the boring periods between battles. They mention (and Latimer has quite a bit about) the many women ...”

“... is deployed in a more realist setting, and more relentlessly. Reading it, I was reminded of David Shields’s remark that with most conventional novels, ‘you have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written.’ Here the key term is, once again, ‘the future’, a quantity that the ...”