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“... it has to be admitted that there is not much left of the carcase of Pirenne’s thesis. Yet, as Richard Hodges says, it obstinately refuses to disappear. If one reason for this is that economists never agree, another, as he also says, is that the very sparseness of the evidence leaves almost infinite room for argument: we have, for example, no early ...”

“... her analysis of the family life of the Byrons and Lovelaces, has about as much sentimentality as Richard Dawkins’s description of the strategy of the cuckoo. She is also a clear writer on the abject role demanded of women, and particularly insistent on the realities of physical suffering, and of 19th-century medical practice. This combination of freedom ...”

“... of authoritarian exhortations to embrace ‘Britishness’. But, as the Blairite columnist Dan Hodges has argued, ‘trying to ape the language of the BNP succeeded only in boosting the BNP.’ It also gave Cameron the opportunity in opposition to belittle the ‘Alf Garnett’ race politics of the Labour front bench and to pledge to ‘reverse the ...”

“... Wales is currently staging a large loan exhibition of the Welsh ‘father of English landscape’, Richard Wilson, curated by Martin Postle and Robin Simon. It is a magnificent show, the first on this scale for more than thirty years. It will be at Cardiff until 26 October, and it is accompanied by a sumptuous catalogue, the fullest, most faithfully reproduced ...”

“... At any rate, there is a very strenuous blend of women-envy in some of the magazines for men. Richard Wollheim has just finished telling us, in ‘Germs’, his frighteningly good memoir extracted in these pages, about wanting to be a woman sixty years ago. ‘I knew that what I wanted,’ he wrote, ‘was, not so much to have her, though I also wanted ...”

“... his performance of Mozart’s Fantasia for piano, K 475, a piece of music that obsessed me. Then Richard Eyre, who had just moved from the Nottingham Playhouse to the BBC, asked me to write a television play and I abandoned the story. I thought that by distracting myself, by doing something completely different, I could come back refreshed to my non-existent ...”

“... from a video taken from an interview carried out by an eminent neurologist, Professor John Hodges, and presumably taped for research purposes. It’s sanctioned, one imagines, by John Bayley, whose efforts on behalf of his late wife and her reputation make Max Clifford seem timid and retiring. One lesson of this deplorable business is never to sanction ...”

“... and Taylor was promoted from drama critic to editor, though with the politician and dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan managing the paper’s political department. This arrangement lasted for two years, until Sheridan, with whom Taylor, by his own account, was especially intimate, decided to position the Post further to the left, and fired his Tory ...”