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“... ultimately be judged and defined by what he does.’ A journalist who may be closer to events, Peter Snowdon ends his book on a more equivocal note: ‘If the last four and a half years have been testing for Cameron’s Conservative Party,’ he writes, ‘the next few will be far harder, whether the party wins or loses.’ Not that Snowdon is in any doubt ...”

“... the moon and the planets to the Empyrean, is a steep learning curve. The Paradiso is the least read of the Commedia’s three cantiche, and the hardest work. If for no other reason, these two new English translations, one by Robin Kirkpatrick, the other by the husband and wife team of Robert and Jean Hollander, should be welcomed. Each edition is the final ...”

“... as the heir to le Carré – one of an admittedly long list of legatees’. It’s hard not to read this throwaway remark as a glancing, self-deprecating self-portrait: in the universe that Herron has created in his Slough House series, the headquarters of one of Britain’s intelligence agencies is ‘the Park’ rather than ‘the Fairground’ or, as in ...”

“... wife. ‘Now we shall never know.’ The regular scenario for many of Barry’s jokes concerned St Peter at the gates of Heaven, so that when he finally arrived there last month it can have been no surprise.24 February. One doubtful blessing of my new and sophisticated hearing aids is that I can hear every rumble and gurgle of my stomach as well as the ...”

“... sound as two women pass in a doorway, the pink ribbon belt next to a naked waist, the socks that read ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ And the mysteries: why do bikinis make you look so much worse than you do naked? ‘Who is the woman,’ the worker in Vietnam double-stitching underwires into bras asks herself, ‘who will wear the bra I am sewing?’ And the ...”

“... Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott; a straw bookmark showed that he was halfway into Volume II. He had read Lockhart before: he had read all of Scott several times since he was a child. The lives of writers were one of his major preoccupations: this biography, written by Scott’s son-in-law, absorbed him enormously. The first ...”

“... of Fontainebleau, which led her to investigate the famous ancient oak there, which led her to read up about a 1400-year-old yew, now gone, in the village where she grew up, which led her to visit the three vast oaks in Fredville Park in Kent known as Stately, Beauty and Majesty. ‘I always need that tiny thread to get myself going,’ she once said. What ...”

“... with masculine approbation. To be sure, Amory Blaine boasts in This Side of Paradise of having read it twice, but on the whole there can be no other book so loved by one sex and ignored by the other. In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir writes: ‘There was one book in which I believed I had caught a glimpse of my future self: Little Women ...”

“... striking similarities, notably on incomes policy, Europe and trade-union reform – which can be read in different ways. One way is to talk of consensus – a philosophical explanation stressing convergence and agreement between the Conservative Party and Labour. Another is to point to the temptations of opposition and the imperatives of government in ...”

“... brilliance of his townscapes and the odd angles and framing of his compositions can also be read as a response to the abundance of the modern city. Menzel was a brilliant observer who had had no reason to learn the craft of formal composition. Whether the oddity and lack of smoothness in his compositions was a sign of naivety, or the result of a ...”

“... Abstract Expressionism had been done, What next? The answer seemed to be a canvas that would read as one field. The very idea of imagery became anathema to him. ‘Imagery,’ Irwin says, ‘constituted a second order of reality, whereas I was after a first order of presence.’ At this point he realised that the straight line was the least ...”

“... those where it is most evident. But it is not only for these that The Decline of Power should be read. It is a fair-minded book, though the author is a little free with condemnations of ‘nonsense’ and ‘ridiculous’. It is fluently, even racily written, but rarely superficially. The publishers will, if they have any sense, follow the example of Fontana ...”

“... of his psychology. One of the reasons so much of the second volume of the letters is depressing to read is one’s sense of the second-rateness and constriction of Forster’s English milieu from the Twenties on. He was living in a diminished and oppressive world: ‘how much of my time I spend with second rate people,’ he exlaims in 1943. The effect is ...”

“... of the Savoy, Leonard Smithers, himself a great connoisseur of erotica, Beardsley noted: ‘I read in the papers here that Stead has established an agency for the adoption of children. Is it true? If so I certainly mean to adopt some nice little girl who could at once satisfy my maternal, amatory and educational instincts. This quite seriously.’ It was ...”

“... Sir John Myres recorded in 1953), ‘Sir, if Herodotus was such a fool as they say, why do we read him for Greats?’ Even though the secrets of his workshop aren’t all out yet (a favourite apothegm of Momigliano’s), it’s safe to say that we have a far better understanding of Herodotean method than our predecessors did. That’s no small ...”