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“... also taunts Bond for not remembering the faces of the women he takes to bed – not the first time we’ve seen 007 slut-shamed. The crater is an allusion to the Japanese volcano that Spectre operated out of in You Only Live Twice, and despite the quasi-Freudian set-up of the jealous birth son having his revenge on the usurping adoptive brother, ...”

“... Willie Chandran asked his father one day: "Why is my middle name Somerset?”’ So begins Half a Life, the strange and chilling novel that V.S. Naipaul published in 2001 – thirty years or so after he first pronounced the novel a dying form. The story begins in the 1930s, in a South Indian princely state, where Willie’s father embarks on a half-hearted and dubious rebellion against the ‘servility’ he sees all around him: against the false security of the maharajah’s little state, against the pieties of his Brahmin family – ‘foolish, foreign-ruled starveling priests ...”

“... crocodile tears. I didn’t read much post-war Nichols, although I couldn’t resist his attack on Somerset Maugham in 1966. I was, however, fairly easily persuaded to review this book – largely to find out if there was more to the prolific and once enormously popular Beverley than whimsical humour and rank sentimentality. What I read was a fascinating ...”

“... it’s as if Rushdie has performed the curious feat for an Indian of writing an Oriental tale. We move up and down the Indus valley, off to a frontier town that is and isn’t Quetta, with constant echoes of the Moghul empire, glimpses of Islam. An aging divine has visions of Mount Hira as he stumbles round the new capital (‘the biggest collection of ...”

“... the only serious one, actually – is that it doesn’t tell us a great deal about Piggott that we didn’t already know. The deafness, the happy childhood, the wartime austerity of his formative years, the impeccable racing pedigree stretching back to the early 19th century, the superb judgment of horseflesh and anything to do with horses – all this is ...”

“... portable paintings have acquired such prestige is not immediately obvious, especially because we have all grown up taking their prestigiousness for granted and calling other art forms, including the massive ones of architecture and gardening, minor arts.’ With this one sentence Germaine Greer provokes several queries and a vehement expostulation. What ...”

“... oddly shaped cows in the surrounding fields and a young bride and groom drifting through the air. We’re in the prewar Dutch East Indies and the painter is Aw’s version of Walter Spies, a German primitivist who tried to do for Bali what Gauguin did for Tahiti. His visitors are Margaret, a precocious 15-year-old whose parents are American ...”

“... With the decline of religious faith, we drift, so it’s said, on the current, clinging to the raft of materialism. The last flickers of collective spiritual belief were doused by the technological advances and grotesque warfare of the early years of the 20th century. Which led, the argument runs, to the mimesis-warping nihilism of Dada and the Vorticists, the semiotic anarchies of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein ...”

“... Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles. No one has had a greater yearning or been better qualified to fill this gap than Donald Richie. ‘Almost everything I do, everything that is known about me, is connected to this country,’ he wrote. ‘To be ...”

“... presented its far-flung possibilities and a casual, indifferent, mischievous striptease. Although we claim – more than ever of late – to crave the star who bares it all, we long for the mystery that Gypsy provided.’ Anyone who saw the famous ‘cellulite’ episode of the Keeping Up with the Kardashians – during ...”

“... fails from time to time to set the record straight aggressively enough, and falls victim to what we should regard as the received malice. Although an admirer, Brady remains a touch less devoted than Barbara Leaming in her 1986 biography, based as it was on long personal sessions with Welles. Brady never met Welles. They communicated by phone and letter, and ...”

“... do now. If so, this was bad luck, for they were much more likely to encounter them than we are in our deodorised world.In the tenth century the Welsh ruler Hywel Dda allowed wives a marital separation if their husbands had stinking breath. In later centuries, books on courtesy warned readers against inflicting their personal smell on their ...”

“... People must not do things for fun,’ joked A.P. Herbert. ‘We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any Act of Parliament.’ From its grey, drizzly cover to its century-long plod of standard-length excerpts, Brian MacArthur’s anthology leaves you in no doubt: there’s precious little fun to be had protesting ...”

“... The second investigation is called ‘About Miss Marple and St Mary Mead’ and is exactly that: we hear everything about this female sleuth and her village that can be derived from a careful sifting through the fairly numerous books that Agatha Christie wrote about her. The remaining pieces are all to some extent the same sort of thing, relying for the most ...”

“... in which he was brought up ... His career has been disappointing, but I would rather read him than Somerset Maugham.’ That is certainly shrewd, particularly the point that the novelist was ‘completely lacking in intensity and completely extroverted’. Wilson even thought of writing a full-scale appreciation of Mackenzie, though he never got around to ...”