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“... still learning. This, her second book, shorter and sharper than her first, is generally a better read. Compared with The Downing Street Years, it has the more difficult task of interesting us in the years of obscurity and preparation. It thus risks bathos in moving, so to speak, from the world of Churchill to that of Holtby. But Thatcher nicely conveys the ...”

“... in anecdotes or reduce it to his neuroses. Mozart has recently been subjected to this treatment in Peter Shaffer’s clever but meretricious play Amadeus, which turned him into a divinely gifted vulgarian, punning and burping his way through high society. But Hildesheimer’s way with this self-imposed assignment has none of these depressing features. He ...”

“... a memoir of adolescence he has written.’ Swallow is a novel to be discussed by lecturers, not read for pleasure. To ginger up his non-story, D.M. Thomas introduces post-Chatterley musings (give them an inch and they’ll take an ell) which do indeed look like improvisations, straight from the stream of consciousness. Here is a Russian at the ...”

“... Italy. Carpenter, predictably, finds the three essayists – Richard Humphreys, John Alexander and Peter Robinson – ‘taking a rather solemn approach to the whole thing’; whereas, he assures us, Pound’s exertions on behalf of these arts partook ‘more than a little of the amiable joke’. Before it is through, Pound’s centenary year will bring on ...”

“... one might have expected from Professor Kiernan. It is the work of a man who is prodigiously well-read, in about eight European languages, in touch with recent research (though a few important new studies seem to have slipped past him), but also familiar with almost forgotten classics like R.B. Smith’s Italian Irrigation (1852) or F.W. Hasluck’s splendid ...”

“... Malcolm. But next time it is up on the old charge of exploitation and fraud I would have the judge read Avedon before he turned to the critics. The few paragraphs in which he describes how he took the pictures for In the American West are the best account of the photographer’s craft I know. They are relevant to work very unlike his own – to ...”

“... in a few colours (red and white were particularly effective) of American examples. Those could be read as prefiguring the abstract painting of the 1950s and 1960s; the exhibition Abstract Design in American Quilts at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1971, organised by the collector Jonathan Holstein, seemed to slot the quilt into the history of Modernism. It ...”

“... this: small heads, holes that transform the solid tree trunk into heavy legs and arms which also read as a landscape of mounds and hollows. The sense this gives that earth and woman are one is emphasised by the way the wood is polished and gouged – the grain follows the form as contours follow the slope of a hill – and led to analyses such as David ...”

“... pale fire-lit yellow, midnight blue or black. It is a small picture, so you lean forward to read it. You enter its space and wonder, item by item, what next? Will the moon rise or set? Will the family stop with the herdsmen? A picture like this is as close as a single frame can come to telling a sequential story. In the opening pages of The Woodlanders ...”

“... this month. To wear one of them seems a bit like pinning on false medal ribbons, but it can be read as a tribute, too, from fan to hero – and also, perhaps, as evidence of the amateur’s need to get as close as he can to the feel of the real thing. The active imitation that derives from passive admiration and sells billions worth of endorsed ...”

“... of labour, and many of the views are spectacular panoramas, nearly everything here asks to be read, or to be looked at close-up, not admired from a distance. You start from what you know. Noses brush the glass as people search out the present emerging in the past, orienting themselves by following bends in the river and streets with ancient names whose ...”

“... a primary question: ‘Who, what kind of person, are you?’ In neither picture can the face be read. Mars’ is in shadow, Venus’ is seen only in a blurred reflection. Even the face of the cupid who holds her mirror is as soft as a photograph taken through a gauze. Look at reproductions in the catalogue* of pictures not in the exhibition and you find ...”

“... Tourists, for example) and copying royal portraits was the basis of a regular trade. Some copies read as duets; in those Rubens made after Titian and Caravaggio one powerful voice sings along with another. Rubens’s copies never quite lose their Flemish accent but are often splendid in their own right. Like many translations, they show that the felicities a ...”

“... normality; even Millet’s solid-limbed and blunt-faced peasant girls: it’s hard not to read them as embodiments of desire (women don’t seem to invent men in that way). When men paint portraits of women the facts of a face dilute the archetype. Gustav Klimt created an eloquently sinister, predatory Judith/Salome type. Her jaw is rather square, her ...”

“... in the game of discrimination; all his friends were rung at one time or another to have a sentence read out for criticism or confirmation. Any visit to his house was likely to involve a discussion about the placing of a sculpture or just how high on the wall a tapestry should hang. He loved arguing about who was the greatest this or that – he was passionate ...”