“... bits of the ‘brilliantly flawed lifetimes’, as he puts it, of the dreadful Duke and Duchess. Peter Watson’s Sotheby’s: Inside Story is also related to a television programme – one that appeared the year before, in 1997. Here the auction house was accused of conniving in the sale of illegally excavated and exported antiquities and of organising the ...”

“... an ironical awareness of the gap between intention and achievement in Government strategy, with a frank acknowledgment of the tacit switch from a Friedmanite monetary policy of gradualism to a Hayekian reliance on ‘sharp shock treatment’. The defence here is that they wrought better than they knew, not that they knew better all along, which is the case ...”

“... its use of brickwork to such canonical Modernist buildings as Dudok’s project at Hilversum and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House.It was this Modernist aspect of Scott’s architecture that made possible de Meuron and Herzog’s own neo-Modernist or, better, ‘post-Minimalist’ adaptation of his building, essentially by stacking a set of boxes in the ...”

“... to suppose that, lulled by the calm and intelligence of their interlocutor, they were more frank than is usually the case when dealing with the media. The former Liberal leader and recent EU commissioner, Frits Bolkestein, for example, is quoted as saying: ‘One must never underestimate the degree of hatred that Dutch people feel for Moroccan and ...”

“... wooing by ingesting and recasting his doctrines and preferred idioms. Memoirs in Oxford is also frank – too frank for Hill, who complains that the poem is ‘ridden by the hag Sincerity’ – about Prince’s state of Prufrockian wretchedness and indecision during his undergraduate years: So old, so battered, so ...”

“... personnel towards the Soviet Union seems to have been generally neutral, and sometimes hostile. Frank Kermode recalled (in an LRB review of Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread) that he knew several intelligence officers who thought it would be no bad thing if the Russians were defeated while serving to wear down German military capability. Up until the German ...”

“... years that followed I got to know him well. Another influence of that time was the fiction writer Frank Sargeson, who distrusted the university and warned me against an academic career. By 1955 I was married and living on Auckland’s North Shore close to the Sargeson house, at the back of which Janet Frame, recently released from years of incarceration in ...”

“... to dance with Jews, or name your children after them.’ Kate’s favourite relative, her uncle Frank O’Brien, is a priest and (as the press describes him) a ‘well-known racing and sporting identity’, who in partnership with his mistress, Mrs Fiona Kearney, widow of a Sydney Alderman ‘named by the Independent Commission against Crime as a notable ...”

“... answers’. There were also appearances by Nigel Farage (who was interviewed by Peterson), Murray, Peter Thiel and the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts. Tickets cost £1500.Marshall​ maintains that his political views have remained ‘remarkably stable’. A well-placed source said that he ‘continues to see himself as a classic ...”

“... A few months ago I went one Sunday evening to a Broadway theatre, not to see a play but to enjoy what was meant to be a thrilling contest between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. The place was packed; except for those sponsored by some publisher, the audience had bought very expensive tickets, and they displayed a keenness more appropriate to a prizefight ...”

“... In​ an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Howard Hawks said there was a ‘great fault’ with Bringing Up Baby (1938): ‘There were no normal people in it. Everyone you met was a screwball.’ At the helm of these crazies, with Cary Grant’s palaeontologist in tow, is Katharine Hepburn’s Susan, except is she really crazy? Her dialogue has the stamp of the Marx Brothers’ best lines – mad-sounding but strangely logical – and for all her daffiness, her relentless speed, her loopy Bryn Mawr voice, she’s often telling the truth: there really is a leopard, and it really does love the song ‘I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby ...”

“... Patience is a mark of the classic, according to Frank Kermode. ‘King Lear, underlying a thousand dispositions, subsists in change, prevails, by being patient of interpretation.’ It follows that a work of art is not a classic if it insists, apparently, on being read in one way. By that criterion, Ulysses would appear to be a classic ...”

“... Frank Kermode having now become ‘Sir Frank’, it seems a good moment to take a look back over his remarkable career: though by no means because that career is at an end, for he is producing at such a rate just now that it is quite a job to keep up with him. Very broadly, one can think of his career so far as falling into four stages ...”

“... possible to write poems.’ Richler includes some grimly beautiful counter-examples, among them Peter Porter’s ‘Annotations of Auschwitz’, a poem which incorporates Adorno’s point:                     Such death, says the painter, is worthwhile – it makes a colour never known. It makes a sight that’s unimagined, says the ...”

“... a reputation as Leftists. The two officers at the centre of this molehunt were Arthur Martin and Peter Wright. Wright was a brilliant scientist and a grammar-school patriot who always doubted the patriotism of his public-school superiors. He held extreme right-wing views. His devotion to rooting out Lefties at the top placed him at the head of the Fluency ...”