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“... tirelessly sardonic and sarcastic bulletins on national life sent in letters to his friend Monica Jones. Larkin’s offendedness was soothed twenty years on when Margaret Thatcher wrested the crown from the unworthy, and he was informed by the Warrior Queen that she had a line of his by heart: ‘Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.’ The book alludes ...”

“... in September by the Waywiser Press. In his obituary of Wollheim in the Independent last November, John Richardson wrote that Germs – which Wollheim thought ‘the best piece of work’ he had ‘ever done’ – ‘must not be allowed to become a chef d’oeuvre inconnu’. Now it will not, though Waywiser is a very small publisher without the marketing or ...”

“... of the heart, but not one of the palate.’ Whoever s/he was can’t have read Fielding, In Tom Jones (1749), ‘what is commonly called love’ is defined as ‘the desire of satisfying a voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate white human flesh’. Not all of the ‘gems’ concern table manners; that’s just one of eleven chapters. Other ...”

“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... to consolidate his place in the history books as Britain’s greatest wartime Prime Minister since John Major, shipping our boys out to the Gulf, boots or no boots, his rhetoric at least is wearing steel toe caps. ‘We are going to be in the front line of this whatever happens,’ he told the Commons Liaison Committee, meaning not, as you might think, that ...”

“... aristocrats speaking of themselves as middle-class, as they frequently do these days.’ So Bence-Jones and Montgomery-Massingberd take the word ‘gentleman’ and make it mean ‘aristocratic’: their definitions define not so much what is as what they think ought to be. They begin by closing the gap between the terms ‘nobility’ and ...”

“... It doesn’t take much to make John Humphrys angry. On the basis of his most recent book, Lost for Words: The Mangling and Manipulating of the English Language (Hodder, £7.99), it would seem that there isn’t much that makes him angrier than bad language. Not swearing – he likes swearing – but bad use of language ...”

“... enjoy?) the condition are known – include Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Kandinsky, Nabokov and Hockney. John Harrison’s Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing, a scientific and historical study, is due from Oxford in March. The condition has been dismissed by at least one anonymous ‘notable scientist’ as ‘romantic neurology’, but in the foreword to ...”

“... but he concluded, tutorially: ‘What is a suite but a museum of dead dances? Next time, Mr Jones must try sonata form!’ Since I like museums and ancient dances, it pleases me to respond that On Going to Bed resembles a good, old-fashioned suite (with a pictorial musée) – and that it might be over-ambitious, hubristic, to attempt sonata-form with ...”

“... be merely Satanic, in the spirit of Conrad’s melodramatic characters, like Gentleman Brown or Mr Jones. Pinkie is strictly for the book. When the famous record to which the heart-broken Rose listens has stopped playing, he vanishes into limbo. Greene was less than ingenuous when he commented, in the second instalment of his autobiography, Ways of ...”

“... not unfriendliness. It should be said straight away that the selection of poems in Emrys Jones’s New Oxford Book of 16th-Century Verse is quite splendid, a veritable treasure house (to use a ludicrous outdated trope); there are no shocking omissions to deprecate, and if some of the poems are lengthy it is because they are long poems. But first ...”

“... are the better their evidence is, at least in a sense. Welsh shows how the evidence against Tom Jones is seen and manipulated by Fielding as a man of the law, a man accustomed to hearing and weighing probabilities. To judge from the metaphors he uses, Shakespeare had great zest in legal ideology and practice, while there is a sense in which the whodunit in ...”

“... than the work of Elton and Gash, broader in scope than Speck, more cogent than J.R. Jones, the book consummates a lifetime’s labour in the field of late Georgian British history. Christie’s approach is of a piece with the series as a whole: the emphasis is on politics and policy-making, on the actions of the governors rather than the ...”

“... Edward Jones – the Burne came later – was born in Birmingham to a mother who died giving birth to him and a father who eked out a living as a frame-maker, although art, his son reported, ‘was always a great bewilderment to him’. The only person who seems to have recognised the boy’s talent – a neighbour who bought pictures to rework – had the dubious merit of having once painted stormy waves over a calm harbour scene by Turner ...”

“... tentatively entitled ‘The Cliché Strikes Back’. The blurb on War says that Amis is, ‘like John Updike’, ‘the pre-eminent novelist-critic of his generation’ (there isn’t, curiously, a reciprocal comparison with Amis on the jacket of Updike’s More Matter). That being so, wouldn’t the best way for a stylist as expert as Amis to do battle ...”