“... concerns of its particular milieu. In Reading for Our Time, J. Hillis Miller is moved to comment more than once on this passage about a spectator alone with a view. To readers familiar with Miller, it will come as no surprise. In a literary journey that has now reached its seventh decade (his first book appeared in the 1950s), Miller has often stopped to ...”

“... music and painting maintains a judicious critical distance from its subject. Readers who wish a more direct report from the front lines of the avant-garde should consult a new anthology, Collective Consciousness: Art Performances in the Seventies, edited by Jean Dupuy.* This documents the work of almost two hundred avant-gardists from Europe and America who ...”

“... inspired by his youthful canvases, typically featuring a gay pink plume against a buff wall. Even more of them imitated the grimmer scenes he adopted in the second half of his career, in which a scrawny arm and corrugated brow are sharply lit against deep shadow. His art was subjected to stern strictures by some of the most eloquent critics and theorists in ...”

“... British) to a petty clerk? Is your word your clerk? I don’t think so. Bond. It’s in the name. More than most literary phenomena, names in fiction seem very straightforward until you start to think about them. The simple question, ‘why does a name sound right?’ leads to a whole range of questions. Are there rules about how names are given to ...”

“... of class-conflicts. In a great novel – so Lukács – in a major fiction by Balzac, Tolstoy or Thomas Mann, the ripening of the epic and of tragic and comic drama is harvested and given full deployment. It is only minor, ephemeral fiction, by which Lukács intends psychological miniaturism on the one hand and naturalism or verismo on the other, which seeks ...”

“... used to exist, as an ex-Tyneham resident complained: there was only ‘Purbeck Valley’. The more general military takeover of Purbeck, temporary in its first execution, made permanent in due course through various bureaucratic and Parliamentary sleights-of-hand, goes back to 1916, when Bindon Hill became the testing-ground of the newly created Tank ...”

“... entry into Nato is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in Nato as anything other than a direct ...”

“... there is nothing of that here), while social reformers made it a persuasive one. In Thomas Annan’s Close No. 118 High Street, from an album produced in the late 1800s for the Glasgow City Improvement Trust, a group of inhabitants pack the end of a narrow alley as though swept down it the way rubbish is swept down a gutter. Such ...”

“... having seen in DeWitt’s novel a starting point for the film. The screenplay is by Audiard and Thomas Bidegain. The performances of Reilly and Phoenix are amazing, and lead us back to the question of what kind of western this is. Eli is a variant on the Faulknerian idiot, apparently unlucky and ungraceful – the scene where a spider enters his mouth while ...”

“... would be friendly to the hand, were it not that your fingers need to stray to Google Images for more.)Owens has wide sympathies and a joyful way with a paragraph. In particular, as a former curator at the V&A, she takes a gourmet’s pleasure in the materials of drawing (Seurat’s handmade paper with its ‘distinct “tooth”, as bumpy as an orange ...”

“... provided American revolutionists with a schema. The pervasive influence of Country publicists like Thomas Gordon, John Trenchard, Bolingbroke and Benjamin Hoadly on colonial pamphleteers is now taken for granted. American historians have tested Bailyn’s thesis by extending and particularising it. This is what T.H. Breen has done in Tobacco Culture. The ...”

“... merely serves the President, so if it was trying to kill Castro then Kennedy must have ordered it. More generally, the evil that the CIA does is no more than the evil of presidents. The argument begs the question, but it also depends upon an unsophisticated approach to the behaviour of large organisations. A body like the ...”

“... in Edinburgh in the 1850s confided that patients entering hospital for surgery were ‘exposed to more chances of death than was the English soldier on the field of Waterloo’. By the end of the 19th century, however, Joseph Lister had introduced an effective antisepsis routine, and this, combined with anaesthesia, had transformed surgery (though mortality ...”

“... commonplace books to place him in a ‘West Riding enlightenment’ based on the ideas of Thomas Nettleton in Treatise on Virtue and Happiness (1736). The richness of the source material made it possible for Steedman to achieve great depth of characterisation, both of the people and of their environment. Labours Lost, a study of domestic servants, who ...”

“... turned it quickly with a wooden spoon.’ Goodwin, it seems, knows that we deserve something a bit more nourishing than the plot, which is 100 per cent cumin-coated tripe. Elizabeth Lowry’s The Bellini Madonna, mercifully, is set not in a Venice that’s trying to be a fake Canaletto but in a ‘17th-century manor house with Victorian accretions’, which a ...”