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“... it is right to report angry comments made by a colleague about a third person – comments which may have been regretted as soon as made. Should I, for example, now report comments made to me about Barbara by people who, to judge from this book, she thought were her admirers? After all, perhaps they were her admirers, despite momentary irritation. Barbara ...”

“... is obsessively riding the New York subway when we first hear it. ‘There’s more to it,’ David Ferrie says in the same novel. ‘There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.’ Surface and secret: even when people dispute the details, the names and the numbers, they ...”

“... favourite from the start and duly emerged as the winner. But he did not win by a short head from David Lloyd George. You have to scour the list to find him in 79th place, listed as ‘English, born Manchester (1858-1928)’. The part about Manchester is correct: Lloyd George’s father – who was not the only Welsh schoolteacher to move there – died there ...”

“... original sin, secularised as the problem of anti-social behaviour, has been remarkably resilient. David Trotter believes that what we have learned to call Modernism is more akin to the cumulative trauma of secularisation, and that if we can’t get a wholly convincing sense of the beginnings of Modernism, we can get the next best thing: a sense of what the ...”

“... Johnson’s speech all over the place, making his hero clearer, making him morally stronger. There may be no reason for us to fuss over this, but it does raise questions about Boswell’s method: are his alterations the work of memory, or are they choices in aid of invention?On Saturday [1 May] ...”

“... found as early as Dante), or even a set of seven couplets. Within each of these variations there may be further variations: do the quatrains hide a couplet within them (abba) or do they make up a couplet of rhymes (abab)? Should ‘a’ and ‘b’ rhymes dominate the octave, or can ‘c’ and ‘d’ jostle their way in too? The sonnet is a toolkit for ...”

“... loudspeakers on the underside of the aircraft, through which might emerge’, according to David Pascoe, ‘passages from Memories of Lenin, interspersed with exhortations about the Five-Year Plan’. Eighty red lights on the fuselage allowed it to flash slogans to the remotest regions as it swooped across the Soviet Union at night. The first foreigner ...”

“... In David Grossman’s 1998 novel, Be My Knife, an antiquarian book-dealer starts a passionate correspondence with a woman whom he has barely caught sight of across a room. The unlikely circumstances of their relationship, its unusual fusion of intimacy and distance, allow them to say, or rather write, things which neither of them has ever admitted before ...”

“... to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking relish. Gossip has its charms, but not when it’s dragged out over three interminable evenings with animated postcard footage re-used to the point of ...”

“... thought, and protested forcibly against, so many things that the critic has to protect himself. He may know a lot about the first generation of European Communists but less about paper-making or indigo or Victorian business management – Morris being one of the pioneers of a ‘house style’. In spite of this, all the emphasis today is on his wholeness. In ...”

“... to what might be thought the most odd, hermetic, esoteric and in-your-face new work. Some visitors may reckon they are visiting a freak show, a playroom or a chamber of horrors, but their refusal to accept that they are in the presence of art minimises the debilitating self-importance a gallery exhibition tends to force on even the most subversive work. The ...”

“... protests like those that make up much of Radical Light tend to fall out of the frame? One answer may be that rhetorical subjects have short lifespans. No one likes the sense of being told what to feel. Longoni’s Alone! shows a young woman, her face buried in her arms beside a lily-covered coffin. Longoni has made grief weakly pretty. Morbelli’s old ...”

“... the property of Lady Marguerite Allan, who took it with her when she sailed from New York on 1 May 1915 on board the Lusitania. Six days later, off the Irish coast, a German U-boat torpedoed the ship, which sank in 18 minutes with the loss of 1198 lives. Among the survivors were Lady Marguerite and her maid, who, professional to the last, kept a firm hold ...”

“... at the Stade de France in Paris, a match in which France defeated Brazil 3-0; on the same day, David Ginola, retired French footballer and sometime L’Oréal model, became the new face of the anti-landmine movement. So far, so unconnected. But now let’s posit the existence of a mysterious secret organisation working tirelessly and ruthlessly to improve ...”

“... online can apply to author-direct.co.uk, a new website launched at the Hay-on-Wye festival in May. It goes live some time this month. Laurence Middleton Jones, the company’s managing director, believes he is in a position to find ‘tomorrow’s writers today’, while at the same time describing electronic publishing as a ‘refreshing step into the ...”