“... face. My mate Fergus sniggered. He said she had funny wee shoes and legs. I have a feeling she may not remember how the conversation went, but I recorded it for posterity in the back of a school jotter the next day. The Queen: ‘Very hot, isn’t it?’ Fergus: ‘Roastin’.’ The Queen: ‘And have you been cub scouts ...”

“... and their ‘barbarism’, he spoke specifically and concretely of London. He may also have been making a veiled appeal to the government not to use the attacks as an excuse to tighten even further its rules on immigration and asylum. Some hope is all I can say. Given how hard people have had to work to stop Charles Clarke’s Home Office ...”

“... badly equipped to compete with video games called things like ‘Wasp Attack IV’. Such games may be hard on the fusebox, but pale children everywhere love them, spending hours out of the sun in the clammy domain of the upstairs boxroom, where each child can become commander-in-chief of a private army of killer insects, which they happily send out in ...”

“... and usually unsatisfactory – ways out of the quandary are silence or cliché. A third way may be available, however: play a game of Scrabble, and what it means to be failed by words acquires a new complexion. Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble by Stefan Fatsis (Yellow Jersey, £15) announces ...”

“... decapitate her; for others, the amputation of fingers or toes would do. Premature Burial: How It May Be Prevented, first published in 1896 and now reissued by Hesperus Press (£9.99), is a catalogue of those unfortunates who didn’t plan so well ahead. ‘The thought of suffocation in a coffin is more terrible than that of torture on the rack, or burning at ...”

“... by Hollywood (Joanne Harris’s backlist, incidentally, is selling like hot chocolate), help may still be at hand in the form of literary prizes. The Booker, which despite Martin Amis’s best protests still considers itself ‘Britain’s most prestigious literary accolade’ (whatever that means), won’t be bestowed until 17 October, and the shortlist ...”

“... letter to Alice Godley explaining why he had to jilt her on the occasion of his escape, may be seen, as she says, in the National Library of Tasmania at Hobart. Another story, called ‘The Red-Haired Girl’, is about a group of poor and talentless young English painters on an expedition to Brittany in 1882, the girl in question being used as a ...”

“... to her tomorrows,’ said Marilyn’s housekeeper, the last person to see her alive. But now we may be in a position to say that Marilyn Monroe’s tomorrows have stretched beyond any known horizon, becoming one of the publishing world’s core subjects. More than six hundred books have been produced about the late movie star; that’s more books than ...”

“... to be put to the question. Music to John Reid’s ears that would have been. Reid’s ambition may well be to establish himself as New Labour’s most illiberal home secretary yet. Such an aspiration means of course having to out-Blunkett Blunkett, and that is a stiff call. Reid no doubt knew when he spoke in Manchester that his predecessor was on the ...”

“... on a single cliff. Its future will be determined, as the Merlin engine’s was, in battle. It may win the commercial war with Boeing – it doesn’t combine technological overreach with commercial finger-crossing as Concorde did. On the other hand, it just may, like Brunel’s Great Eastern, be too far ahead of the ...”

“... just shown, in the lecture on ‘Femininity’ (1933), that women are driven by a penis-envy which may be sublimated into some vague desire for intellectual achievement but which can only be allayed by bearing a child, preferably male, as phallus? If H.D. dreamt of a princess stepping down towards water, to find and protect a baby, while she stood by as ...”

“... beginning to wonder whether the high-tech, jargoned, reader-alienating image of the modern product may not have some disadvantages. Of course it can be argued that there can be no going back, the old criticism having been declared intellectually deluded, dishonest and collusive with political authoritarianism. ‘With the advent of Post-Structuralism and the ...”

“... the elegant public festivals and balls with which costumed Florentines welcomed the first day of May, celebrated princely marriages, and forwarded requests for dates (when these were made by gentlemen of standing to ladies of high position, the government cleared the streets to let the floats, pages, and ever-burning hearts go by on their way to the lady’s ...”

“... critic says he does, and indeed that’s part of the transaction. While the critic’s response may not be fully our own, it is an ideal proxy, a model for what our response might be. Of course Winckelmann’s tone, his language of sensibility, is not what we ask from art critics now (though it is sometimes what we get). But that voice of witness still ...”

“... recognise as one of the ... distinctive characteristics of their own kingdom’. Such chauvinism may say as much about the anxious cultural politics of contemporary France as it does about the history of Poussin scholarship, and yet the underlying concern is not without foundation. The villain of the piece (now typecast by his starring role in other ...”