“... but say Wilson was a piece of more relish.’ I’m embarrassed to say that I think I know what he means: what gives me most pleasure in Wilson’s paintings is the combination of the tactility of his foregrounds – rocks, roads, the bark of trees – and a weightless delicacy, for example in the transparency of his foliage against the sky. In Wilson’s ...”

“... literary company. Between the lines, you glimpse a lovable character bursting with curiosity: a David Attenborough of the cultural world, taking pleasure in every manifestation of symbolic activity from the humblest to the most magnificent. (He even embraced some snarky barbs directed at him by Heidegger and his students.) This congenial impression is ...”

“... voices. In a set of close third-person narratives that are light on dialogue, ‘voice’ really means thought, and there’s a lot of thinking, and overthinking, in Summerwater. Even when the characters are doing stuff (running, putting on wellies, making a cup of tea) the action is mostly inner action: while trying to have a simultaneous orgasm with her ...”

“... longer a word to be murmured with self-deprecation. It had become an enterprise, an undertaking, a means of finding ‘solutions’ for ‘problems’ in the present culture. In Scrutiny’s second issue, Leavis published an article that asked: ‘What’s wrong with Criticism?’ Desmond MacCarthy’s modest compilation handily supplied some of the ...”

“... had already been firmly established in the Bible as meaning ‘preacher’. ‘Amal, which means ‘suffering’ in Job and ‘effort’ or ‘labour’ in Ecclesiastes, is translated as ‘suffering works’ in order to give it a hint of Christian theology. In one of the documents ‘arelim, ‘uncircumcised’, is duly translated as that, but the ...”

“... the members of the Labour group in the Lords. It is clearly a Good Thing, both in itself and as a means of projecting their own usefulness to the Labour cause, that they should inflict as many defeats on the Conservative Government as can be engineered. But it is also a Bad Thing in the sense that too frequent success could provide a framework for Tory peers ...”

“... general rule that other cultures (say, Clifford Geertz’s Bali) possess political structures and means of debating them. The present volume takes us to Italy and Spain, France and England, the Netherlands and Germany, but not to Catholic, let alone Orthodox, Eastern ‘Europe’, or into the vigorous intellectual life of Islam or the East Asian ...”

“... with about as much in common as Michael Howard and Dennis Skinner. One of them is described by David Solkin in his Painting for Money, reviewed in these pages last year by Ronald Paulson. Solkin’s Hogarth is an ambitious social climber, determined to efface the memory of his beginnings as an apprentice in the trade of silver-engraving, and to become a ...”

“... were painted by Abraham Bosschaert, an Antwerp painter displaced to the Hague: landscapes by David Vinckboons from Mechelen and Antwerp; and architectural fictions by Paulus Vredeman de Vries, another refugee from Antwerp who eventually settled in Amsterdam by way of Danzig and Prague. It is persuasively suggested that the marked specialisation ...”

“... reader a recognisable stock character. This is Ronald Reagan, here renamed President O’Reilly. (David Lodge’s version, ‘Ronald Ruck’, was funnier.) D.M. Thomas offers a farcical interview with President O’Reilly in which the old man is so confused that he can only answer the question before the last:     ‘What is your outlook on ...”

“... to be swapped by plastic surgery with a part of Anne’s nose (Philip’s advice here: ‘By all means rub your new chin but don’t pick it’), making him slavishly follow his grandmother’s advice about meeting new people: Start off by putting strangers at their ease. ‘Have you come far?’ They always like that one. And always ask how many years ...”

“... consider the facts without venturing to interpret them. One of the first accounts of Buchenwald, David Rousset’s L’Univers Concentrationnaire, is rather weak on facts, but offers a welter of interpretations – glorifying the strength and discipline of organised Communism in the camp, yet making the connection with Kafka, Ubu and the ‘absurd’. This ...”

“... in which Uriah Heep – ‘looking flabby and lead-coloured in the moonlight’ – explains to David Copperfield the experiences that showed him the value of being ’umble. ‘Dickens was a great connoisseur of hypocrisy,’ she writes, ‘yet he was not obsessive about it ... Why has his sense of humanity been so rare? Why are people so overwhelmed by ...”

“... about the brief moment of joy he felt when he saw the planes fly into the twin towers – ‘David beating Goliath’ – at which point ‘you’ (Liev Schreiber) turns firm and Bruce Willis-like and says: ‘and you wonder why your family is being threatened.’ Changez is seen giving a lecture at Lahore University and bellowing ‘We will wipe the ...”

“... for the episodes, or tell us that the cast of O’Dea’s Your Man consisted of Jimmy O’Dea and David Kelly, or that Th’Oul Lad of Kilsalaher featured Danny Cummins and Máire Hastings. All a bit half-hearted. I can find only one video clip online of Flann O’Brien being interviewed, from 1964. It’s astonishingly depressing – the man is so ...”