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“... girls seem a different species. The production which the events of the story bring to an end is of Peter Pan. In it Stella controls Tinkerbell’s torch and O’Hara plays Captain Hook – and Mr Darling, ‘as is traditional’. ‘There are numerous books on the meaning behind this particular play,’ Meredith says at the first rehearsal. I am not qualified ...”

“... like Henri Yellowwine, of John Murray’s ‘Adventitious Publicity Dept’, or ‘“Ginny” Rose Lee of the Go-Karts and Strip Arts Council’, and anyone else anaesthetised by the poetry biz, not least W.H. Laudanum. But they turn just as sharply on one Conilho Moraes (‘c/o the Poetry Book Society’), whose version has the diabetic prince’s ...”

“... Snip and you have, for example, the violent spirit of the time: Bath Theatre Royal bar manager Mr Peter Coe is being treated for back injuries after being attacked by two Brownies. The girls, aged about nine, lost their tempers because he had run out of ice cream. They kicked and kneed him and he was hurt when he fell over ... Other members of Mr Coe’s ...”

“... it out with smart new office desks. Smaller domestic interiors may preserve an undatable ceiling rose or clumsy chimneypiece, things covered in the estate agent’s prospectus by the phrase ‘many original features’. When panelled doors had not been replaced in the 1960s with modern flat ones, a new owner would sometimes find that a sheet of plywood was ...”

“... colour of an object that looks white by day, orange under a street light and pink through rose-tinted spectacles? However, the source of my own moments of disassociation is not, I think, epistemological but a by-product of time spent painting watercolours from life, an activity that has brought with it the habit of judging light and dark while ...”

“... descriptions’. Although a dress was sent – Titian had insisted on ‘crimson or rose velvet’ – he seems to have found another that suited the picture better. But when a candidate for marriage was being checked out it was important to see the sitter in the flesh. Holbein had only three hours to draw Christina of Denmark, but he worked ...”

“... ambiguous skin colour to sleep with prostitutes without paying. ‘One night it did not work. He rose from the bed and told the woman that he was a Negro. “You are?” she said. “I thought maybe you were just another wop or something.”’ Twenty years earlier, James Weldon Johnson, a black man who served as American consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua ...”

“... 20th-century cult of childhood is that the illusions he could never escape did not deceive him. Peter Pan’s appeal to the audience to save Tinker Bell’s life is irresistible: ‘Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe! If you believe, clap your hands!’ Brave little Tink is saved every time. Some really did have faith in ...”

“... powering the gorgeous prescience and horror of William Gibson’s Neuromancer novels, only to peter out, pretty much, by the mid-1990s, as the dull commercial reality – the real ‘consensual hallucination’, to repurpose Gibson’s phrase – of internet shopping kicked in. There was also, after 1977, the Star Wars problem, and the visual similarity ...”

“... of her work by Duke University Press and of this essay, Paul Myerscough interviewed Jacqueline Rose in front of an audience at the London Review Bookshop. An audio recording of the interview can be found here. We live in revolutionary times. I cannot imagine now what it would have been like to be thinking about Rosa Luxemburg if the revolutions in ...”

“... Although it sets out to explore the lives of Fred and Rosemary West – along with Peter Sutcliffe, the most notorious figures in recent British criminal history – Happy like Murderers reads more like a novel than a documentary. In this respect, it recalls Truman Capote’s ‘novel of fact’, In Cold Blood, which made compelling fiction out of the brutal and senseless murder of an apparently typical American family in rural Kansas, and created a new genre on the way ...”

“... of evidence, not just the size of the audiences, but letters and diaries and reviews. Proust rose from his sickbed to attend. But like Dame Laura in the wings, we must imagine what they saw by interpreting material of the kind that is set before us here: material that is never complete, experience that is never direct. The music is still alive in the ...”

“... standing in frontal poses in which pubic hair is strongly accented. In some portraits – those of Rose von Rosthorn-Friedmann and Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, for example (the first of these and a study for the second are in the exhibition Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life, until 31 August) – a hint of the imagined type may be ...”

“... field studies. Over a period of forty years beginning in 1973, the Princeton biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant studied the seed-eating ground finches on a small island in the Galapagos, noting the ways in which year by year changes in the weather pattern, from heavy rainfall to drought, drove changes in body and beak size in the ...”

“... or in dank forest pools; sunless studio north light casts its chill over many imagined forests and rose gardens at the Academy. Girl-types, like tunes, can stick irritatingly in the mind, but I would have guessed the supply of new varieties had run out.Not true. The work of John Currin at the Serpentine Gallery (until 2 November) shows one in the making. It ...”