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“... reproduces his bill from a pizzeria in Verona, dated 1980: it was in this restaurant that he first read about the murders (but not yet the fate or names of the murderers). It shows the date of the dinner, the price of the pizza and the wine, and the names of the owners. One of them is called Cadavero. You wouldn’t have to be paranoid to feel targeted by ...”

“... accounts of this period, such as Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) by the German literary critic Peter Bürger, the project of aesthetic purity, which we used to call ‘modernist’ (as in abstract painting), and the mission to reconnect art and life, which we used to label ‘avant-garde’ (as in Dada or surrealism), are usually distinguished as two ...”

“... he apparently had a touch of dyslexia and was not much good at punctuation the diaries are hard to read. Many entries, especially when they concern his schooldays, are repetitive, and some simply lack interest, so the editors cut a good deal that treats of games and other trivialities. Evans compensates for these lacunae by reproducing the selected items ...”

“... based on Bertrand Russell’s 1927 lecture ‘Why I am not a Christian’: ‘If you were to read his essay,’ he tells the dean, ‘and in the interest of open-mindedness I would urge you to do so, you would find that Bertrand Russell, who is one of the world’s foremost logicians as well as a philosopher and a mathematician, undoes with logic that is ...”

“... in an 18th-century house, brought up, truth to tell, in the 18th century.’ He went to Eton and read English at Cambridge, where he met Nick Tomalin, Hugh Thomas, Mark Boxer and Neal Ascherson. Among the enduring friendships of his student years was that of the founding editor of the LRB, Karl Miller. McEwen and his wife, Romana, later went on a road trip ...”

“... be discovered. My first encounter was a series of debates at the back of the football bus in which Peter Ustinov took on Ribbentrop’s son on the justice of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. A few months later, these ideas, and other ideas – Surrealism, colloquial poetry, and the new architecture – were everywhere. There was a new dawn, but a dawn forced on by ...”

“... Women in the camps were given a temporary reprieve from the gas chamber on condition that they read to her. Was her inability to read being offered as a partial excuse for her crimes? Was Schlink playing on the emotions of his readers in order to blur distinctions where, for the sake of history and justice, there should ...”

“... sitting back and thinking about Porter’s Boeotia’,† an essay which takes off from Peter Porter’s poem ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Hesiod’, and which seems to have followed on from their interchange at the 1975 Poetry Australia ‘Write-In’. Athens and Boeotia are seen as ‘two models of civilisation between which Western man ...”

“... Tynan’s flamboyant, showstruck, star-fucking excitement, he too was an invigorating critic to read ... Why Tynan was influential within the theatre is hard to explain.’ (Jonathan Miller, who likes explaining, is particularly interesting when he finds something ‘hard to explain’. Tynan, too, liked explaining.) ‘There was a certain gullible, vulgar ...”

“... met, Jack Edge,’ Binding drifts dangerously close to the mythical bucolic never-never land of Peter Ackroyd’s English Music. He shares with Ackroyd a love of music-hall, or its wilder sibling, the Punch and Judy show. On one level, that is what A Perfect Execution is. An exhibition in a tent or a glass box at the end of the pier. Pantomime horror, like ...”

“... down at full throttle’, these phrases not only seem to me to misdescribe the poems we have just read, they don’t seem to describe any Rilke poem we could imagine. Think of this delicate, simple, stately late poem, and ask yourself about the throttle (the English translation is Snow’s): Ach, im Wind gelöst, wieviel vergebliche Wiederkehr. Manches, was ...”

“... and learned to draw, and through another of the floating population at his parents’ home met Peter Watson. In Watson, the heir to the Maypole Dairy Company fortune, and founder with Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender of Horizon, Craxton found a friend, an indulgent patron and a way into the avant-garde. He had a narrow brush with conscription, from which ...”

“... Listen to Jonathan Meades introduce and read this piece on the LRB PodcastAsneaked photograph​ from the earliest years of this century shows the teenage prodigy Wayne Rooney leading his parents out of the sea on a Mexican beach. They are about to move into an unknown world, where they will, all three, lurch from idolisation to easy prey, from objects of pity to mean-spirited envy – the adolescent has a gift, the elders have his blood ...”

“... naked faces to documentary scrutiny. ‘The film you have just seen was an improvisation,’ we read on the screen at the end of Shadows. But this is not true – or not of the film we have just seen. It was truer of the first version of Shadows, which had three midnight screenings in New York late in 1958 and caught the eye of Jonas Mekas, a central figure ...”

“... incongruities – but the tsar had good reason to be sceptical of the institution. His grandfather Peter III ruled Russia for only six months before his wife, Catherine the Great, overthrew him in a palace coup in 1762 and shipped him off to prison, where he was quietly murdered. Nominally, Catherine ruled as regent for her son Paul, but once he reached ...”