“... the museum after its redesign by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. In the New Yorker John Updike likened its presence to ‘an invisible cathedral’, but it is closer to an abstract palace. The main access is now nearer Sixth than Fifth Avenue, and you enter from either 53rd or 54th Street into a lobby, paced with white columns, that cuts all ...”

“... Minds have been made up about John Updike. A typical review will begin by grudgingly acknowledging the brilliance of his ‘style’ – as if Updike’s style were a set of dainty curlicues, and not his manner of thought – before complaining about his misogyny, his conservatism, his theological bad faith, the gratuitousness of his language ...”

“... US and Britain cope with mass death and the destruction of livelihoods. Covid-19 shattered what John Stuart Mill called ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion’, forcing many to realise that they live in a broken society, with a carefully dismantled state. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it in May, unequal and unhealthy societies are ‘a good breeding ...”

“... Berlin’s most memorable essays deal with writers like Sorel or Tolstoy, rather than with the major political philosophers of the modern period. The sympathy they reveal for the informal and undoctrinal is one of the attractive features of his work – but it has its costs. Where there are elements in a particular corpus of ideas which for one reason or ...”

“... in Washington DC into a hotel. He had been chosen by the government over the owners of Hyatt, major donors to Obama, because of his superior negotiating skills. If he had a flaw, his father used to tell him, it was that he was too tough: ‘Be a little like Jeb Bush once in a while, soft.’ I’ve watched many of Trump’s speeches, all of which seem to ...”

“... left – does. Jeremy Corbyn is out of the party and won as an independent at the last election; John McDonnell had the whip suspended in July for voting against the new Labour government to scrap the two-child limit for Universal Credit or child tax credits; Ken Livingstone has Alzheimer’s. Their shared mentor, Tony Benn, is long dead. Beckett is an ...”

“... ship was put back on an even keel. Curiously, although the Grosart debacle, fully documented in John Bicknell’s edition of Stephen’s letters, is briefly mentioned in Alan Bell’s exemplary entry on Stephen in the ODNB, these misdemeanours make no appearance in Arthur Sherbo’s entry on Grosart. Thereafter, the DNB maintained its announced schedule ...”

“... to Moscow by monarchs and ministers from the Gulf states. He had revived Russia’s image as a major rival to the United States in the management of global affairs. He had even succeeded in sidelining two years of tension over Ukraine and raised the possibility of an end to sanctions against Russia. Such is the demonisation of Putin by Western governments ...”

“... it. Despite his English sympathies, Dunbar’s poetry did not travel well across the border. Major works by his near contemporaries Robert Henryson and Gavin Douglas were printed in England during the 16th century, but none of his own. Nor up to now has there been any evidence that manuscript versions of his poems circulated in England. This makes even ...”

“... precedence. To undertake a new full-scale biography of William Shakespeare, then, or to suggest a major alteration to our understanding of the playwright’s early life, is to walk directly onto holy ground: in setting out to produce Shakespeare: A Life and Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’, Park Honan and E.A.J. Honigmann have taken on tasks which are about ...”

“... otherwise incomprehensible indifference to current events is seen by him in 2007 as possessing one major virtue: ‘When I began to travel I saw places fresh.’ But has he seen ‘places fresh’, as he claims? Or is he no more than a prisoner of his history and heritage? It is a question worth asking. Many people have strong opinions about this Trinidadian ...”

“... dimly lit pre-takeoff mode. Travelling on a south-eastern trajectory, through halts symbolising major culture shifts – Canary Wharf, Custom House, Woolwich – we time-travelled through remembered eras of colonisation, industry and investment. We were unravelling the Knowles thesis, the assertion that money moved in from the East, like the foul winds of ...”

“... During the same period, Armstrong recorded 235 numbers for Decca, the most commercial of the major labels. Decca never ran out of ideas, many of them poor, for variously teaming their contracted artists – e.g., Armstrong’s ludicrous 1936-37 recordings with two clunky Hawaiian groups, The Polynesians and Andy Iona and His Islanders, part of a ...”

“... a gambler. A professional gambler until his death at 27. Poker. High-low was his action. He was a major leaguer in that line and regrettably there’s a formidable attrition rate as regards high stakes and its lifestyle equivalent. But it was high stakes from the start with my brother: 48 or 72-hour marathons with thousands of dollars changing hands; all ...”

“... for it was shaped by an escalation of tensions between the US and Russia. The Kremlin has three major complaints against the West: the recognition of Kosovo’s sovereignty, Nato expansion, and the siting of installations for a US missile defence shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. Russian spokesmen warned, angrily and often explicitly, that if any of ...”