“... the magazine’s new readership (we have to make do with a single observation made on a train by Michael Heath); it peters out badly in a classic ‘cont. p94’ fashion; and is in places very slapdash. For instance, Marnham’s key theory of the gear-change in Ingrams’s character – a boozy, ribald funster who in 1967 went off the sauce and emerged a ...”

“... not in the interests of the United States.’ Another Third World enthusiast from Georgia was Andy Young, Carter’s former Ambassador at the UN. Mr Young, too, was swept off his feet by Agha Hassan Abedi, and during his two terms as Mayor of Atlanta took a consultancy fee of $50,000 a year from BCCI. During that time he ...”

“... an earlier generation, since overtaken by Bacon and Freud. Craxton still sits with John Minton, Michael Ayrton, Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash as a Neo-Romantic painter, part of the postwar reawakening of the national landscape tradition of Blake and Palmer. In 1987 an influential exhibition at the Barbican, A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in ...”

“... sells drugs, and the son sees that money and says: “I’m tired of living poor.”’ A third of young black men are unemployed compared to a tenth of young white men; black people earn on average just over half as much as white people. In fourteen Baltimore neighbourhoods, life expectancy is lower than in North ...”

“... Biggs in the LRB of 22 March 2012). Here and there in her book, Cusk muses on Greek myth: her two young daughters are ‘interested in the ancient Greeks. They have a surprising knowledge of Greek mythology … When they talk about it it’s as though they are talking about something they personally remember.’ She turns to Freud, who viewed the formation of ...”

“... stretches from Hölderlin to Rilke and Celan. Unlike them, however, he is little known in Britain. Michael Hamburger’s translations established Hölderlin and Celan in English, but he was less fortunate with Trakl, and Decline, his pamphlet of 1952, was not reprinted. There was a larger selection by James Wright and Robert Bly in 1961; and Hamburger’s ...”

“... in an earlier watercolour, they hold the instruments of Poetry, Painting and Music. No doubt the young women are taking their father’s narrative to heart, and in due course will rephrase it in terms appropriate to their arts: the lute and lyre are in the margins of the plate, ready to be strummed. But the first form of the story is visual: Job sits in a ...”

“... was small, sensual and irrepressibly witty. John Chinnery, a ‘China expert’, was very young and still in the Communist Party, although his Party discipline was constantly threatened by his merry sense of the absurd (he was to become an inspirational professor of Chinese at Edinburgh). Last, and most improbable, was the great painter Stanley ...”

“... was the best player he ever saw, he will normally choose either someone he played alongside when young or someone in the team he manages, or seek refuge in saying that there are so many good players it’s hard to choose. I once heard Bill Shankly asked that question and, quick as a shot, he replied ‘Denis Law’, the sort of remarkably honest choice you ...”

“... she said. ‘And although he was a very silly, injudicious, and at that moment not very pleasant young guy, I don’t actually think one tweet should ruin your job prospects.’ Shaming occurs when there is a conflict between a story we want to tell about ourselves and a story that is being told about us. Sacco made a satirical joke to her friends and was ...”

“... tragic sense of life; but if it is possible to be too old in spirit, it is possible also to be too young.’ I think Wieseltier raises the right point, but gets it the wrong way round. For a tragic sense of life is exactly what has marked Obama’s candidacy from the beginning. His powerful memoir, Dreams from My Father, written in his early thirties, is shot ...”

“... reckoned with. The writer who has entered most deeply into this moment of Courbet’s imagining is Michael Fried. The material world in Courbet, Fried persuades us, is not to be thought of as something separate from the body that encounters it. Painting consists in finding a way of intimating the deep continuity between body (meaning the body’s experience of ...”

“... there is a girl in it (the first black woman tap dancer, Jeni LeGon) who looks just like her, a young woman in the age of rewindable VHS, and because there is a move in the finale that is ‘back from the future’, the impossible-looking 45 degree forward lean that Michael Jackson would popularise in his ‘Smooth ...”

“... Shaun Murphy, a solid player who was the world champion in 2005, named the retired footballer Michael Owen. Judd Trump, currently ranked second in the world, named the still-playing footballer Mason Mount. Mark Selby, who has been world champion four times and UK champion twice, said Nicko McBrain, the drummer from Iron Maiden. When the journalist asked ...”

“... his replacement, John Swinney, sullied their reputations by defending the former health secretary Michael Matheson, who misled Holyrood’s presiding officer over £11,000 of roaming charges racked up on his iPad. The SNP’s centralising tendencies, lack of transparency and clumsy handling of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill (which would have allowed ...”