“... Johnson proudly asserts that he makes no effort to ‘conceal’ his ‘opinions’. What this means is that his approach to history is polemical, one-sided and prone to gross oversimplifications. An excellent storyteller, he describes very well those figures from the past whom he admires, from George Washington to Ronald Reagan. Those he dislikes, on the ...”

“... Wollheim has to say about particular works of art is certainly not obvious. A start-ling but by no means unusual case is provided by the beautiful and moving double portrait (in the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston) by Degas of his sister the Duchesse de Morbili looking up with raised eyebrows and placing her hand tenderly on her husband’s shoulder. Wollheim ...”

“... I read it in Heinemann’s Best Short Stories, the annual selection edited by Giles Gordon and David Hughes. I made a mental note of the author’s name, Helen Dunmore, because I’d never heard of her before. A name to watch for, I thought, and watched for it in The Best of Best Short Stories, 1986-95. Dunmore was not included, which I thought a puzzling ...”

“... relations linking him with Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d. 1282), the last native Prince, but this by no means persuaded all the Welsh to see him plainly as their leader. The intrepid Dafydd Gam of Brecon, whose name commemorates a squint, gained legendary status as one of Glyn Dŵr’s most committed opponents. He died at Agincourt, among the many Welshmen serving ...”

“... her a wonderful massage, and instantly transforms her from sex object to sensuous liberated woman. David Kunzle challenged this narrative in Fashion and Fetishism: A Social History of Corsets, Tight Lacing and Other Forms of Body Sculpture in the West (1982), arguing that the dangers of corsets were exaggerated or even invented. Women, he claimed, wore corsets ...”

“... producing what it’s best at producing, and exporting that abroad. The writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo are so influential in the trade world that most experts refuse even to discuss the merits of this basic laissez-faire assumption. The US, born out of a tax revolt in the same year that The Wealth of Nations was published, has long accepted it, and ...”

“... but there’s no indication that that is an informed opinion. Has he read (for example) David Marr’s Vision (1982)? Has he heard that there are honest-to-God theorems about the inference from one-dimensional retinal representations to representations of two-dimensional form; and from representations of two-dimensional form (and motion) to ...”

“... is passed to the Iraqis. A loyal secret police, says John Pike, a military expert in Washington, means ‘the new Iraqi political regime will not stray outside the parameters that the US wants to set.’ It will ‘reign but not rule’. Meanwhile, power will largely remain with what is now called the Coalition Provisional Authority, which, together with its ...”

“... rusting in the weeds, but a few days later we read that the car that belonged to their leader, David Koresh, has been auctioned for $37,500. No word on who gets those big bucks. In the university town of Austin, Texas we begin to see bumper stickers again. They flaunt their hipness: ‘Keep Austin Weird’ is a motto you see on T-shirts and bags, and ...”

“... to. In 1987, in the catalogue published to accompany an exhibition about the Harlem Renaissance, David Levering Lewis referred to Larsen as ‘the mysterious and lovely Virgin Islander’. Eight years later, in When Harlem Was in Vogue, Lewis relayed the (unsourced) information that Larsen was looked down on by ‘some of her fellow Virgin Islanders’ for ...”

“... book business since 1960 is, according to Epstein, retrograde. ‘Trade publishing’, by which he means the careful making of good books, is ‘by nature a cottage industry, decentralised, personal’. He concedes that books are a business, but adds ‘though not a very good business’. Like poultry, they thrive best in free-range smallholdings. However, as ...”

“... from Indian takeaways. Within a couple of paragraphs in Injury Time, he moves from Yeats to David Beckham to Dame Gillian Beer – consummations devoutly to be desired. He is consistently pleasantly unpredictable, in the way that, say, E.B. White was consistently pleasantly unpredictable, or perhaps Alastair Cooke delivering his weekly Letter from ...”

“... as well as the patriarch’s retinue of scientists and theologians, stood like a row of Caspar David Friedrich solitaries, facing the ice as if facing their judge. The Ilulissat ice fjord leads back to one of the world’s most powerful glaciers, the Sermeq Kujalleq. Its cliff-like face is three miles wide and, counting its hidden underwater bulk, nearly a ...”

“... the north shore of Queens. ‘New York remains New York,’ one of the Steinways said, ‘and that means a city where democracy called by its true name is the rule of the mob … Heaven help those who by expressing republican sentiment may provoke the rage of the mob.’ The warehouses on the Queens waterfront and on the empty streets leading away from the ...”

“... Crawford, an IFS economist, quoted in the FT: ‘For the Ministry of Defence an 18 per cent cut means something on the scale of no longer employing the army.’ The FT then extrapolates: At the transport ministry, an 18 per cent reduction would take out more than a third of the department’s grant to Network Rail; a 24 per cent reduction is about ...”