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“... their several appetites satisfied by any great glut of lurid detail. Jill Saward’s ghost writer, Wendy Green, has done this ingenuous or idealistic or immature young woman – she presents herself as all three – the service of finding a flat, uniform and very nearly monotonous style to describe the lunchtime nightmare of 6 March 1986. It’s a style ...”

“... because they struck a blow against ‘the three most obvious privations of the season: the lack of green leaves, light and warmth’. Guy Fawkes remains ‘a comfort to gathering darkness ... a potent symbol of excitement, heat, light and celebration ... at precisely the moment when the onset of cold, darkness and decay are most apparent’. So, too, Christmas ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... to pick up my children?’ And as he snatches the wallet out of my hands, with credit cards, my US Green Card, receipts, children’s photos, memberships for the British Library, the London Library, the Warburg, the Courtauld – all those pieces of myself so laboriously assembled, so telling – the lament rises. ‘Oh, this is terrible. My IDs, my money. How ...”

“... his successful New Jersey life includes a perfect family and a satisfactory mistress in Wendy – ‘a nice kid with an oral hang-up who he’s pretty sure will never phone the house’. Henry and Wendy, amongst their erotic sport, play not at Doctor and Nurse but at that less familiar variant, Dentist and ...”

“... on the top and Tesco bags full of paper underneath. Harrow has a system of compulsory recycling: green bins for paper, cans, bottles, and brown bins for organic waste, which includes garden waste and leftover food. People in Harrow who mix the stuff up, or ‘contaminate’, have their rubbish left uncollected, and must pay £20 to get it picked up, after ...”

“... swarming to spend money in Nottingham. Was Robin a proto-Communist? Were some of the Men in Green actually Men in Red? In the early texts Robin doesn’t give to the poor (a point Eric Hobsbawm missed in Bandits); he just gives, like most common or garden bandits, to numero uno. But he certainly robs the rich, and his politics are satisfyingly ...”

“... merits of which derive from the balance of heating and cooling ingredients. ‘Food work’, as Wendy Wall calls it, was a subset of the care of the body, and this intertwining is everywhere in the recipe culture Wall describes. Thus the manuscript recipe book of Mary Birkhead from about 1680 now in the British Library (which Wall cites but doesn’t ...”

“... from out of white space, the unmistakable head of Harpo Marx. Turn a few more pages of Wendy Wick Reaves’s spectacular book Celebrity Caricature in America, the catalogue for an exhibition at the Smithsonian in Washington DC until 23 August, and you will also learn unmistakably to recognise the artist, Miguel Covarrubias. There’s Covarrubias ...”

“... attempts suicide, surviving to be rehabilitated in a mental hospital. As its title suggests, Wendy Law-Yone’s book is about the presence of death in the midst of life, about human nature quavering between the will to live and the will to die. ‘Living things prefer to go on living’ is as far as she is prepared to go, and she only reaches this point ...”

“... when the art collection and the building interact wonderfully well. Three giant bronze beetles, by Wendy Taylor, huddle at the bottom of a spiral staircase, encouraging you to look down at them and take in the perfect curve of the concrete at the same time. A Barbara Hepworth sculpture – Ascending Form (Gloria), on loan from the Hepworth Estate, a circle in ...”

“... with much penetration about its subject but doesn’t interfere with it either, no flashy stuff. Wendy Pollard’s record of Johnson’s life is scrupulous; she sticks to the diaries and the letters and the work, and her admiration for her subject and enthusiasm for Johnson’s writing is unflagging. By the end of the book the enthusiasm feels touching, a ...”

“... history starts to crowd it out. In September​ last year, in Lutterworth in Leicestershire, I met Wendy Warren. She was born in Kent in 1935 and moved to Leicester just after the Second World War when her father, an engineer, found work there. She did well at school and was set to go to college, but her father lost his job and she chose to help her mother by ...”

“... instance, where one is told, neither helpfully nor convincingly, that the ‘tiny iridescent lime-green eyes’ of horseflies ‘sparkle like planets that have shrunk to beads’ – but is allowed freest and most embarrassing expression in the title-poem of his book, as well as the central sequence of monologues in ramshackle quatrains, where the imagined ...”

“... An unforgettable occasion. A motor eased alongside Tony at the corner of Blythe Street, Bethnal Green. Ron and Reg were inside, keeping company with a known associate, Dickie Morgan. Reg was nicely cased in a blue three-piece by Woods of Kingsland Road. Dickie matched him. (The Twins were very influential that way. All the faces were expected to dress to a ...”