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“... of the officers, forks and glasses in hand, will seem less self-evidently absurd to anyone who has read van Alkemade or Schama and is aware of the importance of festival rituals in 17th-century culture. This example is very far from being the only one in which Schama juxtaposes the evidence of contemporary writers with that of artists. Indeed, abetted by his ...”

“... devoted precious years to such a task? It is difficult to believe that those who have actually read the book will not feel they have an adequate answer literally in their hands. For its author capitalises on the fact that the LSE is virtually unique – Imperial College is analogous in the natural sciences – among major British academic institutions. The ...”

“... all are doctrinaires, they are united not by doctrine, but by a mood. As a rule, it is better to read a man’s books than a book about his books, but anyone wishing to find out what distinguishes the New Right from the New or Old Left would be puzzled by the anthology of Roger Scruton’s squibs. It is evident what Professor Scruton does not like: the ...”

“... upward paths of a whole field of larks might have a shape like this. The oval marble fish can be read as the abstracted average of all things which slip through water – seal flippers, submarines and diving birds as well as fish. Nor is Brancusi’s smartness to be ignored. In the portraits (the most famous are of fashionable women) abstraction and ...”

“... the European School played up to caricatures of their homelands. The French were moody: the boys read graphic novels and the girls wore Chanel. The Italians were appalled by the food and seemed to take badly to multilingualism (one Italian refused, out of a sense of patriotism, to speak any foreign language even though he had never lived in Italy). There ...”

“... Why do people read a biography of Shakespeare? Either as a substitute for or as a supplement to a reading of his work. I may read about Byron or Orton because the life itself is both well-documented and well worth watching; but Shakespeare’s life is neither. How he behaved, what he endured, who he knew, where he went – such information does not expand or deepen my grasp of human possibility, as in their different ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does ...”

“... of 1952-3. McEwen quotes Moore saying that the subject owed something to the bedtime stories he read to his daughter. Their majesties look like survivors of a distant age, an effect enhanced by the fact that they recall the lean, tense warriors of archaic Greek and Etruscan sculpture which was cast in bronze directly from small wax models, as well as the ...”

“... nature and his daughter’s very method of fiction. Not surprisingly, Woolf disclaimed having read her father’s works. But, as Beer puts it, ‘her earlier familiarity with his work had taken the form of dipping, scanning, listening, a flighty and intrigued resistance which allows rereading and pillaging and avoids immersion.’ Actually, the argument ...”

“... he only really sputtered to life again in 1990 with an autobiography, and died a few years later. Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg at the Hotel de Londres, Paris in 1957. Bob Thompson, ‘LeRoi Jones and his Family’ (1964) Brion Gysin, ‘Calligraphy’ (1960) Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Untitled (Primrose Path, the Third Mind, p.12, 1965) Ettore ...”

“... can learn how sheets were folded, and even how to make sketchbooks of our own: shades here of Blue Peter. One such chapter introduces pleasant distinctions between ‘sketchbooks with a regular structure and professional stiching’, ‘sketchbooks with a regular structure and non-professional stiching’, and ‘sketchbooks with both irregular structure and ...”

“... set fire to the RAF bombing school – or training camp, depending on your point of view, though Peter Ho Davies tacitly takes the nationalist line – at Penrhos. Arthur drinks on the other side of the pub from the English soldiers, in the Welsh-speaking public bar. His daughter doesn’t share his politics: she’s ‘proud of her Welshness’ but ...”

“... are erudite and caustic: a sting in the tail of this sometimes bland collection. Certainly, Peter Gay should read Lloyd-Jones whenever he feels a fit of hyperbole stealing over him. ‘The astonishing range of Freud’s discoveries, his unparalleled gift for reading evidence’, ‘advocate of genius’, ‘this ...”

“... technology: less 2000 than 2001. The first plate shows ‘Analyst/Programmer Peter James at work on the British Library Online Catalogue’. Peter James’s head is cropped to give a central prominence to his hands on the keyboard and the all-important screen which displays ...”

“... of Sporting Ladies (c. 1770) is typical of many entries from whores’ directories included by Peter Wagner in Eros Revived. Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, published regularly between 1760 and the early 1790s, prided itself on providing up-to-date information for the sporting gentlemen of London, including full details of starting prices and hot ...”

“... ever believe a word we wrote. I cannot count the number of letters I get from people who have read my column in the Mirror and say, ‘We simply couldn’t believe your article about X and wonder if you could tell us whether he is suing you’ –or something of the sort. When I worked for Private Eye, this reaction was even more common. Private Eye, one ...”