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“... filled by Mr Williams – provide a continuing narrative and one that makes compelling reading: it leaves this reader at least with a strong sense of frustration that the diary should end on 9 October 1956, with the still more dramatic events of Gaitskell’s remaining six years as Leader either unrecorded or the record lost. Unlike Attlee who ...”

“... accounts of the failure of mothers to visit their infants at nurse make distressing reading, as do the horrifying descriptions of how foundlings were treated. It must be true that such practices were more common in France, and especially in Paris, than they were in England. But no one whose knowledge was confined to books like that of Mme ...”

“... the companion exhibition at the National Gallery, which deals with Degas as a collector, is like reading the other half of a correspondence. The tonal purity of the little Roman landscape by Corot was answered by a similar precision of notation in Degas’s early race-course and ballet-school pictures. The pinks and blues of a Gauguin flower piece are a ...”

“... exuberantly invented or appropriated names – Ikea, Asraboth, Otis Lemming – ambush you into reading the documentary account of a murder as if it were simply another overplayed punch line. The switch can be interpreted in several ways. You could assume that you are coming under satirical attack – that Depraved Indifference is a sly exposure of the ...”

“... it required a great deal more moral courage than I had at the time.’ What was needed, on this reading, was a more courageous Redeemer than Joseph, not one who was cleverer. Here are the implicit terms on which Joseph deferred to Thatcher’s superior claims as leader, while she deferred to his as prophet. Two further points help to establish Joseph’s ...”

“... and the eternal’, where the stone figure of the Commendatore is undeniably a case in point. Peter Gay explores the opera’s ‘hidden agenda’, long ago exposed to the light of Freudian day: in this Oedipal reading, Mozart’s ‘unconscious rage against his father, disciplinarian and exploiter’, is reflected in ...”

“... him through, laced with a partly affected Aussie contempt for British toffs, doesn’t make good reading. Nor, of course, does official prose as a rule. Official prose tends to be thought of as clumsy and slightly weak on grammar, the sort of thing that goes: ‘Applications are required to be submitted not later than the 1st April with the exception of ...”

“... Slavic name), provided rich pickings for grave-robbers until looting them was made illegal by Peter the Great in the early 18th century. It was Peter the Great who commissioned the first archaeological excavations of Scythian tombs and his Siberian Collection, on which much of our knowledge of Scythian material culture ...”

“... cabaret at the ICA during Poetry International, 1973. ‘Bob Lull’ was first encountered there reading his newly composed ‘Notes for a Sonnet’. Later in the evening, he appeared, unable to leave well or ill alone, with the poem rewritten – ‘Revised Notes for a Sonnet’ – and then in a third appearance provided an anguished coda entitled ‘Notes ...”

“... includes a scene in which he is tricked into having sex with some sooty pots and pans. Acting or reading out plays helped pupils connect to a second language. It taught them to deliver Latin speeches clearly and meaningfully. Learning a language was also training in the effective use of voice.It is easy to overlook how loud premodern education was. Most of ...”

“... of its namesake, seems consecrated to the unusual and the mortifying. The current show – Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs of corpses, amputees and hermaphrodites – holds a grotesqueness sufficient to remind the visitor of how sweet, how antique already, the infamous Mapplethorpe images have become. At least his models were alive. Circumstance has ...”

“... Others are crumbly or empty or both. The editing is lazy. Some articles are followed by potted reading-lists, others not. There is no description of the contributors. Edward Timms writes usefully about Benda and Gottfried Benn. He notes accurately that the Dreyfus Affair lies at the very roots of the relations between intellect and power, between the ...”

“... backed off and charged again, while the nanny waited nearby, a seemingly dispassionate spectator. Peter Coates’s study of the evolving meanings of ‘nature’, in Europe and North America, is preoccupied with the human tendency to invade nature, altering, exploiting and ‘reinventing’ it. He culls a telling image from the Guardian for 9 August ...”

“... president and governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre over many years and supported both Peter Hall and Peter Brook at a time when their avant-garde work frequently brought storms of criticism. He had a voracious appetite for both English and French literature and liked to hunt down French novels on the Left ...”

“... accurately his chronicler will record his adventures.’) The writer stumbles across characters reading his books, only to be told: ‘It’s no big deal. It’s just a book.’ Then in Leviathan, published some years later, Auster uses the same initials for the narrator, Peter Aaron; and anagrammatic sleight of hand ...”