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“... Whether by happy accident or design, the publication of Peter Jackson’s George Scharf’s London coincided with the opening of a notable exhibition at the Museum of London called simply ‘Londoners’. Although Scharf’s oeuvre is most readily classified as topographical art, his sketches are as descriptive of the everyday Londoners who went about their lawful pursuits in the decades between 1820 and 1850 as they are of sides of the emerging metropolis which down to that time were largely neglected by the best-known London iconographers ...”

“... Since being acquitted of child molestation charges last summer, Michael Jackson has been hanging out in Bahrain, enjoying the hospitality of the ruler’s poptastic son Sheikh Abdullah. Jackson is said to have become a Muslim (which is sure to please his critics on Good Morning America), but evidence would suggest he has yet to get the hang of Islamic custom ...”

“... Philip Ward-Jackson’s Public Sculpture of the City of London* is the seventh volume of Public Sculpture of Britain. It does for public sculpture (but not sculpture inside churches or galleries) what Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner do for the buildings the sculpture is on (or near) in The Buildings of England volume on The City of London ...”

“... icon, Russian artists were mostly occupied with importing Western academic conventions. Under Peter the Great and his successors, the Empress Elizabeth and Catherine the Great, Russia’s Imperial Academy of Arts produced artists – however great their technical ability and however great their talent – who were ultimately indistinguishable from their ...”

“... at a horrific rate, that onto the scene charged the exotic figure of Flying Officer Derek Jackson. He had already flown 60 sorties as a navigator with 604 Squadron, resulting in 11 combats, five enemy bombers destroyed, with four more damaged. He was also a lecturer in spectroscopy at Oxford, part-owner of the News of the World, a rampant ...”

“... and at present a praiser of his own past.’ No wonder that two veteran Joyceans, John Wyse Jackson of the Chelsea Press, editor of Flann O’Brien and Oscar Wilde, and the Dublin social historian Peter Costello, should have been inspired to produce a full-length biography of, so to speak, Our Founder. It is in its ...”

“... shell that served as his hermitage, but encased in his glass sphere by the Iminac Company of Lake Jackson, Texas, he’d been preserved against decay. In effect, he had become – simultaneously – mummy, exhibit and bibelot, a quintessentially kitsch object which entranced its discoverer, fond admirer and future theorist. Rodney provoked in her reveries of ...”

“... to Ian)? Was Barbara Skelton having an affair with the Polish war artist Feliks Topolski when Peter Quennell came onto the scene, still married to his third wife, Glur, but making Topolski so jealous that the men resorted to fisticuffs over Barbara? What made Janetta, still married to Hugh Slater, fall in love with Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, and would that ...”

“... blocks of black ink that delete, or nearly delete, every appearance of the word ‘pope’, from Peter the First on. The deletions are meticulous and they read like controlled rage: a careful and unswerving attempt to erase a memory. They were made in the early years of the Protestant Reformation; in 1535 Henry VIII demanded that his subjects strike out all ...”

“... How​ does a comic writer describe a world that has stopped being funny? What to say when the system you satirise is swept away, when parts of the population are killed, when the survivors become refugees, drifting away en masse but it’s unclear where to? Teffi was faced with these questions as she tried to make sense of revolution in St Petersburg, as she fled through the Civil War, as she crossed the Black Sea along with other refugees to start a new life in a place which would in turn be engulfed by fascism and war ...”

“... a transvestite in a cultural representation,’ she writes, ‘signals a category crisis.’ So in Peter Pan, the subject of one of the most telling chapters in the book, ‘category crises are everywhere,’ – crises about class, gender and the differences between adults and children. This simple point, that one category always suggests another, leads ...”

“... do if you’re a bachelor, or James Goldsmith, or a lesbian, or Welsh, or a good-looking nun, or Peter Parker, or a social worker, or a cat? You could always (well, not the cat) try taking Waugh to court. But who would want to stand up in the Old Bailey and declare himself not ‘the silliest man in England’? And who would wish to be measured and perhaps ...”

“... father sent him to Africa with a view to curing him of his infatuation with an older woman, Lilly Jackson. Before her lover could return, Lilly married someone else. D.S. Higgins argues persuasively that Haggard consoled himself with a native mistress: for the rest of his life he was haunted by remorse for this ‘secret sin’, though he still found room in ...”

“... a runner, he would win the 100m and the 5k, but would be best-known for his marathons. His coach, Peter Nielsen, describes him as an ‘incredibly annoying opponent’ because he is happy to grind away for hours at positions most top players would accept as a tie. He often upbraids colleagues who agree to early draws, arguing that they should play out the ...”

“... who played George Smiley in the 2011 movie version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, was cast as Jackson Lamb, the compellingly repulsive head of Slough House, for the television adaptation, which has been on Apple TV+ since last year (two books down, six and counting to go). Alec Guinness inhabited the role of Smiley so completely in the 1970s BBC version ...”