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“... later to one of his old fellow-robbers who, without missing a beat, replied: ‘Not one of her best.’) The dark side of the robbery, of course, was what happened to Jack Mills. Here’s Reynolds on the subject: I regretted what had happened to Mills but I believe it was exaggerated out of all proportion ... Although I wasn’t there (on the train ...”

“... Wales and by immigrants from the ‘New Commonwealth’. Although their chapter contains about the best short history I have yet seen of Ulster’s troubles from 1968 to date, I am not myself persuaded that the authors have got their perspectives right. Admittedly, the title ‘United Kingdom’ is a misnomer, so long as the Northern Irish problem remains ...”

“... of Dear Bill letters, is a gleeful addition to the canon); and it has employed some of the best cartoonists around. Marnham is disappointingly uninformative on the graphic side of the Eye, which crucially helps its appeal as the adult’s comic. There’s an interesting paradox, for instance, in the fact that the magazine which published some of the ...”

“... energy of Candide, as it rushes from one extreme situation to another. The new translation by Geoffrey Brock is wonderfully faithful to Collodi’s speed and vigour. Until now, the best-known modern translation has been Ann Lawson Lucas’s, and in several respects it is still a better buy, thanks to Lucas’s detailed ...”

“... industry over the span of my grandmother’s life is fairly remarkable. In 1916, according to Geoffrey Jones, a business historian, only ‘one fifth of Americans may have used any toiletry or cosmetics.’ This would mean that four fifths of Americans used neither toothpaste nor shampoo, never mind moisturiser or deodorant, lipstick or hair gel. In ...”

“... him, though, he imagines it’s ‘a sprightly 65’. The narrator of Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), Geoffrey Braithwaite, is a sprightly 65, or thereabouts. He’s a retired, widowed doctor, whose wife, Ellen (note her initials), was serially unfaithful: in other words, he’s a sprightly updating of Charles Bovary, however much he would resist the ...”

“... diary and the letters she exchanged with her cousin Franklin Roosevelt, found and edited by Geoffrey Ward) and No Ordinary Time (Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the home front during World War Two) are products of the current obsession with the private lives of public figures. But the books about the President’s women are ...”

“... Willows, or even the ‘safe pit of blackness’ in the Dorset countryside where the narrator of Geoffrey Household’s 1939 thriller Rogue Male goes to ground. As for the bunker under the White House that Donald Trump went to ‘inspect’ on 29 May, while Black Lives Matter protesters gathered near Lafayette Park – well, think what you will about that ...”

“... Jon Stallworthy asks in the afterword to Singing School. His short answer is: ‘because, to the best of my knowledge, no one else has done so, and the schooling of poets seems a potentially rewarding subject.’ The longer answer is that ‘in the early chapters of their autobiographies, Coleridge, Hardy, Yeats, Sassoon, Graves, Day Lewis, Spender and ...”

“... in which tiny fragments of glass are assembled to form a picture – not always in the best possible taste. Mark Girouard’s biography of James Stirling is constructed by a similar procedure, an astonishing accumulation of small details, asides and memories building up to a portrait. Big Jim is vividly told and convincingly three-dimensional. And ...”

“... You​ would be hard pressed to describe Geoffrey Hill’s final work. To say it is a sort of notebook cast as a prose poem in 271 sections of greatly varying length doesn’t get you very far. In one way it is squarely in the tradition of Pope’s Dunciad (which it mentions): it is a poem about the betrayal of England, a yowl of anger and outrage at the prevailing imbecility Hill often addressed in his later works ...”

“... to become a garden designer. Sally Festing convincingly argues that it was not as a second best to painting, as has been suggested, but on this point, as on many others, she otherwise seems to find ‘Gertrude’ (as she boldly calls her) inscrutable. Indeed her subject is often maddeningly uninformative. ‘To see Mr Ruskin,’ she writes in 1865, and ...”

“... reputation than about his philosophical ideas. It therefore comes as a bit of a shock to read Geoffrey Warnock’s study. The impression here conveyed is that Austin was almost pathologically incapable of getting anything right. Time and again Warnock has to correct obvious mistakes, apologise for unclarities, expose ground-floor misconceptions. It is all ...”

“... be disabling, even if unkind critics carp that this is merely because Volvos don’t run on coal. Geoffrey Hawthorn (LRB, Vol. 6, No 17) seized on ‘the extraordinary fact about Thatcher’, that ‘no one is standing up to her,’ as affording ‘some reason, even if one is not a miner, and even if one accepts the most optimistic view of the supply of ...”

“... die is the man that’s dead already.’ The two killers, Marvin and Clu Gulager, are by far the best thing in the film, scary, thoughtful and funny all at once, although you also have to admire the effect of what Geoffrey O’Brien calls Angie Dickinson’s ‘chic rapacity’. Otherwise the film is too slow and too ...”