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“... in this country, though an unfamiliar name to most readers of verse in America. The other, Nicholas Christopher, is one of the most celebrated of America’s younger poets but – I suspect – an unknown figure in England, at least as a poet (his novel, The Soloist, was published by Pan last year). In each case, this disparity in reputation ...”

“... The last word of the reissue of Mr Nicholas, Thomas Hinde’s exquisitely glum and fearingly funny novel of 1952, is probably a misprint. At least, it is minutely different from the last word in the Penguin book in 1962, the issue which brought Hinde’s consummate first novel to an even more widely appreciative public ...”

“... of Tehran where a bus will pick us up, I feel a mild sensation of dread. My people – my father, Nicholas (brother), Rory (oldest friend), Christina (cousin) and Camilla (relieved ex-girlfriend) – are undeniably different from the Ghezelayagh family and appendages. It would be foolish to expect the two families to bond instantly when the son of a retired ...”

“... be, as every son is but momentously more so, the victim-beneficiary of being his father’s son. Nicholas Mosley wanted when young to believe in his father; he moved on to wanting to believe his father; he moved on again to wanting to believe that his father – well, many things, but mostly that his father was not a monster and that his survival into an old ...”

“... almost to the point of fusion. Wilhelm II and George V were both grandsons of Queen Victoria. Tsar Nicholas II’s wife, Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt, was Victoria’s granddaughter. The mothers of George V and Nicholas II were sisters from the house of Denmark. Wilhelm and Nicholas II ...”

“... a portrait of Glazebrook, he chose to represent him with Hollis’s 1970 catalogue in his lap. Christopher Wilson’s excellent Richard Hollis Designs for the Whitechapel, the final book from Hyphen Press, is not only a detailed analysis of the work of Hollis, with whom Wilson collaborated from 1999 to 2004, but a story of aesthetic and social change as ...”

“... and its ways, seem simply to have been found, not made. And how simply. These are arts which Christopher Burns has yet to master. There are others, however, of which he already has an impressive command. Snakewrist, a first novel of unusual promise, is far too concerned with getting across a message to sustain over its full length the illusion of being ...”

“... Venetians in 1687 is illustrated in Francesco Fanelli’s Atene Attica (1707); James Stuart and Nicholas Revett describe the dilapidated state of the temple in their Antiquities of Athens (1787); and William Gell captures in watercolour the removal of sculptures by Lord Elgin’s agents in 1801. Alongside these records are the earliest known drawings of the ...”

“... Compared to boring old Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, we think, had a short life and a gay one. When not writing his sonorous verse, he was spying, preaching atheism, fighting and getting murdered. Park Honan has done one of the two already, and now has done the other. Coming shortly after David Riggs’s solid, even too-solid The World of Christopher Marlowe, his Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy feels a little lightweight ...”

“... sweep gives, in passing, thirty years’ worth of social change in Canada, Britain and Ibiza. Christopher Matthew’s Loosely Engaged is a sequel to Diary of a Somebody. For those who are at work by nine o’clock of a weekday morning this information will mean less than it should. For Matthew’s original Diary was a big success in a small way from its ...”

“... a piece of exquisite pornography by Jan Steen belonging to the Queen (and admirably discussed in Christopher White’s recent catalogue of Dutch pictures in the Royal Collection*). Through the frame we see a woman seated on a bed putting on her stockings. There are some emblems suggesting danger on the threshold or sill, but there is no harm in looking, and ...”

“... from the laws of libel. (I happen to be travelling in the opposite direction.) More than half of Nicholas Garland’s book is given over to an account of demoralisation and defection at the Telegraph, and the whole of Watkins’s effort is an education in the nightmare of the Queen’s Bench. Garland approaches the relationship between politics and ...”

“... My favourite recent book about the Queen is called The Queen’s Knickers by Nicholas Allan. It is a picture book for small children. The centre spread presents several rows of knickers for every royal occasion: Union Jack knickers for state visits, black knickers for state funerals, tartan for Balmoral, knickers printed all over with corgis for home, and appliquéd with real holly for Christmas, ‘which is why she keeps her Christmas message very short ...”

“... the imagination. The single-track privatiser in Downing Street herself appointed the ludicrous Nicholas Ridley (now let loose on an even wider stage) to reproduce in the national bus network an unregulated free-for-all: at least bus operators do not lay lines or make much of their stations, but the hopelessly uneconomic railway network which the 20th ...”

“... may turn out to be more interesting than anti-slavery itself.The voyage of the Recovery provides Nicholas Rogers with his subject in Murder on the Middle Passage. The torture and murder of the unnamed girl off the coast of New Calabar has never received more than passing mention in histories of the anti-slavery movement, probably because it was a scandal ...”