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“... and the invisible coat Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood, And Sabra in the forest with St George! The move from wonder to instruction might seem an inevitable consequence of the move from oral to literary tales. But even a highly literate tale like Alice in Wonderland cannot be reduced to the didactics of ‘Don’t talk to rabbits’ or ‘Watch out ...”

“... His prose is a remorseless solvent of what normally constitutes literary distinctiveness. Dr Miller has some penetrating things to say about this, and about how the meandering accumulations of Dostoevsky’s descriptions – and his humour above all – ‘depend on the reader’s acquaintance with the form of the novel of manners or the domestic ...”

“... than just grieving for the one. And humour does catch up with the pathos. When Jean Dujardin as George Valentin, past-it action hero of the old movies, incinerates his house and almost kills himself by setting fire to the reels of all his old films, the intelligent dog who was his co-star goes and fetches a cop. The cop, very slow to realise that the dog is ...”

“... of the Smith resolve), he met a young milliner, Anne Longden. She was the daughter of a local miller, far beneath him in fortune and rank. He made her his mistress, and Barbara Leigh Smith was the first of the five children she bore him. He did not marry Anne. The more fastidious Smiths including Florence Nightingale’s well-to-do parents, were never ...”

“... The title ‘Prime Minister of Mirth’ was awarded not to Major but to the music-hall comic George Robey, with his red nose and half-moon eyebrows. The two men have little in common beyond their right-wing views. It is true that many actors spring to life only when they step on stage. Yet one could be forgiven for thinking that even a couple of ...”

“... the ‘organic community’ and the theme of country v. city. Its four essays are concerned with George Sturt, the Hammonds, the Parisian photographer Atget, Leavis, and the much-sociologised Mexican village of Tepoztlan. It shows about as much social understanding as a wet sponge, with a literary sensibility to match and a penchant for displays of ...”

“... own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.’ It is safe to assume that the Oscar Wilde of ‘The Decay of Lying’ would feel far more at home in the America of ...”

“... Hary’s Wallace; and in the brassy Reformation of John Knox it blares even in the sophisticated George Buchanan’s over-the-top ‘Elegy for Jean Calvin’. The volume remains high in some of Robert Fergusson’s sophistic-performative street-talk, Burns’s on-off, rip-roaring ‘Tam o’Shanter’, MacDiarmid’s last trump blawing ...”

“... by a gallery of friends and neighbours, are ready and waiting for them. Jonathan and Rachel Miller contribute their Saturday Salad that can increase in size as the friends flood in. Some of them may arrive in the condition of Rowan Anderson when Maureen Sutton was murdered: comatose from drink. The brandy and champagne mix here called ‘Colin’s ...”

“... in love. But while Jong took her inspiration from the hard-boiled egotistic journalism of Henry Miller, Dick has digested new theory to write her novel: ‘When we make love,’ she observes (without apparent facetiousness), ‘the switch of masculine/feminine signifiers is speedy, intricate, overwhelming.’ Deconstruction is an idea that hovers over the ...”

“... years of Thatcher, Reagan, Clinton and Blair, these two books are full of exhilaration and hope. George Monbiot writes mainly about Britain in a terse investigative style that I had feared was out of date. Naomi Klein, based in Canada, ranges all over the world and writes infectiously with verve and passion. Again and again their themes converge. Both ...”

“... and highly verbal Bannon, who did not really do any actual writing himself; there was Stephen Miller, who did little more than produce bullet points. Beyond that, it was pretty much just catch as catch can. There was a lack of coherent message because there was nobody to write a coherent message.’ I got an invitation to Michael Wolff’s book party. It ...”

“... as new reader, took unaccountable dislikes to some of the early work. He didn’t like Daisy Miller, for instance. (The rejection of The Bostonians, however, he could blame on the publishers, who did not want it included in the Edition.) How one misses the clean New England lines and high definition of the first published version of The American ...”

“... describe 17th-century England as a country ridden with class hatred, but 1688 bore it out. John Miller’s Seeds of Liberty, although emphasising the dependence of the Revolution on its acceptance by a broad and well-informed political nation, concedes that the nobles led and the people followed. A hundred years later the principle of deference looked ...”

“... Mail’s Harry Longmuir had little difficulty locating him in the ‘Président’ suite of the George V. Checking in himself, Longmuir spent a whole Sunday morning with a confused, disorientated Maudling in his dressing-gown. Maudling chatted away amiably – providing damning copy – while drinking the contents of Longmuir’s minibar. Many elements of ...”