“... documented as a mere hangover. (Waugh’s letters, announced for publication in the autumn, may further muddy the water for any future autobiographers among his enemies.) The Paris visit provides several more agreeable recollections, like that of seeing Lady Diana’s Chinese chiropodist ‘move reverentially towards the bottom of the bed’ at her ...”

“... friends. But there is another difference between them apart from writing style – indeed, it may explain the difference in style. When Haines left Downing Street, Harold Wilson offered him a knighthood. Haines refused. Bernard Donoughue is now Lord Donoughue. If blandness is Donoughue’s problem, Callaghan’s is whimsy: The Queen held an evening ...”

“... seem to get their digestion right. The monkey incident worries Abhay’s parents. They fear it may cause a riot at the nearby temple of Hanuman, the monkey god who is also the god of poetry. Besides, they are fond of the monkey. So they bring him in and nurse him while he lies unconscious, with occasional confused memories of his former incarnation as a ...”

“... the space between the machine and the foreman. By remaining within the idiom of his situation Voss may deny himself more fulsome forms of expression but in so doing he imitates the effacement or denial of personalities by their work-roles. The fit is also more brutally physical. In the poem ‘Victorious’, ‘the janitor’s body’ is ‘stooped’ with the ...”

“... of candles in the newly reopened cathedral. Admirers of the earlier, Francophile Julian Barnes may regret that in his latest work (which was first published in Bulgaria) the author of Flaubert’s Parrot and Talking it over has shed his brilliance and dandyism to become a rather sombre recorder of his times. The greyness seems inherent in his ...”

“... hostile to the ‘voluntary’ or unsupervised contributions of individual investigators. He may have been, but Martin has chosen a bad argument to prove it. In 1589 Bacon wrote under official inspiration a piece against the Puritans, which Martin interprets as an attack on ‘voluntaryism’ in the Church. So far as I can see, this is what historians ...”

“... readers – to express what is often thought but feminist cant refuses to acknowledge. Jacqueline may end up being slightly more self-assured about herself and her bum, but the real happiness of her denouement, we understand, has to do with bagging a nice bloke. As someone who has written more than her fair share of ‘girl’s life’ columns in her ...”

“... barbarisms of apartheid. A small but suggestive show at the Morgan Library in New York (until 10 May), smartly curated by Sheelagh Bevan with well-chosen publications, prints and photos mostly from the recently donated Stillman Collection, examines his short life and long afterlife, along with his explosive writing.How do the Symbolist Jarry and the Ubu ...”

“... both rocks their case foundered.It did so because the hearing, which was spread over three days in May 1960, attracted news coverage which came to the notice of a number of former regimental pipers. From what Penny told me years ago, and from what I recently learned from Gerald Pointon (a graduate in music and law, then the newly hired articled clerk to the ...”

“... better. Both sittings were late at night. Yiddish had won recognition by stealth. Its diminishment may not be permanent, however. As the vernacular language of much of the orthodox Haredi community, Yiddish still has prominence both among the diaspora and in Israel. As the expression of a pan-European Jewish cultural heritage, existing in multiple forms and ...”

“... to find they are indeed a thing: typically ex-offenders ostensibly on rehabilitation schemes, who may legitimately sell door-to-door but can also be – I read in the Nottingham Post from September 2020 – joint-casing burglars or their abetters. Some, it’s alleged, even sniff banknotes they receive for hints of mustiness – a sign that more might be ...”

“... raises the price for everyone. The richest countries are forced to pay more; the poorest countries may have to go without.Some of the hike in the price of gas is the result of industrial economies ramping up production as the world part overcomes, part assimilates the pandemic. Some of it is a consequence of catch-ups on coronavirus-delayed maintenance. But ...”

“... a premier coup is intended as a work of art in its own right. Executed in a single sitting, it may share the unfinished properties of a preparatory study, but must succeed or fail on its own terms. The time constraint is crucial because it forces the painter to make a series of rapid decisions on the basis of observation and perceptual ...”

“... unfinished estates watching films with the devotion of young people with nothing else to do. We may have been wearing American T-shirts and jeans, lip gloss promoted by models (the legacy of the boom was the awful homogenisation of everything), but we still recited lines from films with the same conviction that Barry and his friends, two decades ...”

“... his right lung was restricting his breathing. His condition deteriorated quickly, and he died in May 1995, at the age of 64. More than 90 per cent of cases of mesothelioma are linked to exposure to asbestos, though the cancer usually develops decades later. Popple was apprenticed as a joiner during the postwar housing boom and would have worked on building ...”