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“... memoirs of Hitler’s dog has achieved ironic elevation in Grass’s Hundejahre. Closer to home, Michael Hamburger has devoted himself to bringing German poetry before us and to maintaining its unity over time, space and civil warfare. Where, we must ask ourselves, do the books under review belong in the bushes that have sprung up along Hitler’s posthumous ...”

“... in the world of food, in a course designed to appeal to the clever and curious and artily-minded young. So here it is: SPU27, an acronym standing for Science of the Physical Universe 27. Spelled out in English, the name of the course is Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science. The person who thinks it’s funny that SPU sounds like ...”

“... that final shifting of tents. Yet Monty’s scholarship was a puzzle to some. One of these, as Michael Cox recounts, was Lord Acton: ‘You know Montague James?’ he asked a King’s man. ‘Yes, I know him.’ ‘Is it true that he is ready to spend every evening playing games or talking with undergraduates?’ ‘Yes, the evenings and more.’ ‘And ...”

“... after the league shut down in March. Fans and players retreated to their homes and watched Michael Jordan instead. The basketball podcasts I listen to paused their endless speculation about the shutdown and the possible resumption of play (later that summer, the league finished the season in a bubble at Disney World in Florida) and gave in to nostalgia ...”

“... One day in 1993, I found myself on a bus in Oxford with Michael Foot. He looked shambolic even by my standards – donkey jacket, stick, long hair all over the place. But nobody minded. You don’t often see leading politicians on a bus and passenger after passenger came up to say hello. He smiled and was the soul of friendliness ...”

“... and his ‘fidgety ghost’ – the phrase comes from one of his Pericles-inspired poems, ‘Young Prince of Tyre’ – still haunts Australian poetry. One pictures the poet lugging a battered second-hand typewriter from flea-pit hotels to temporary lodgings, watching through sleepless mosquito-plagued nights (‘Now/Have I found you, my ...”

“... in only four years: ‘The bodies, now mumia, had been those of slaves and other dead persons, young and old, male and female, which he had indiscriminately collected.’ In 1546 the German physician Leonhard Fuchs still regarded this new form of mummy as disreputable, complaining of ‘the gory matter of cadavers received evidently from the gallows or ...”

“... Jill Saward’s ghost writer, Wendy Green, has done this ingenuous or idealistic or immature young woman – she presents herself as all three – the service of finding a flat, uniform and very nearly monotonous style to describe the lunchtime nightmare of 6 March 1986. It’s a style which perfectly suits the banality of evil, and such is its economy ...”

“... Tiepolo,’ Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall write, ‘is not a difficult painter. He is accessible and easy to like.’ Well, up to a point. For example, while I did not find the Tiepolos in the Royal Academy’s exhibition of 18th-century Venetian art ‘difficult’ in any obvious way, I did not find them ‘easy to like’ either ...”

“... Jerry says, as Joe drags him out the door. More recently, in Entourage, the HBO series about a young movie star and his gang, we see how the agent-as-harbinger-of-comic-confusion has become, in the modern era, the agent-as-conductor-of-cosmic-chaos. In Series Two, our young actor, a Hispanic on the brink of ...”

“... for Roubiliac’s statue of Newton ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’; Newton a young man and unwigged so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like. We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the ...”

“... Michael Reynolds is the marrying kind of biographer: president of the Hemingway Society, he has published a 140-page annotated chronology of Hemingway’s life, a 2300-item inventory of Hemingway’s reading, and a monograph-length study of the creation of A Farewell to Arms, as well as three serial volumes of biography: The Young Hemingway (1986); Hemingway: The Paris Years (1989); and Hemingway: The American Homecoming (1992 ...”

“... threatening to turn even Gandhi into an also-ran. Meanwhile, he makes a cameo appearance in Michael Dobbs’s new Good-fellowe thriller, which revolves around the hunt for his next incarnation in London. The Chinese villains are as dastardly as one might wish from HarperCollins, as sinister as the Manchu embassy officials who in 1896 kidnapped the ...”

“... At the centre of Michael Cunningham’s new novel, in the second of its three tales, Cat, a black woman police investigator in New York, has the job of receiving and recording the calls of people threatening to blow themselves and others to pieces. Only because these deranged stories have become too familiar does she miss the one who really means it, a young boy, who, without forewarning or apparent motive, goes up to a stranger in Central Park, embraces him and explodes ...”

“... sort of funny entertainment’. Rock’n’roll as modern vaudeville: I doubt the precious George Michael would agree. On the cover of I was a teenage Sex Pistol Matlock peeps cagily over his shades at you; Bare has George in one of his standard-issue moody pouts. I take it the title connotes the craven exposure of the most secret soul: risky – this risibly ...”