“... a hearty, back-slapping, unquenchably loquacious Army type, though there is just a hint that he may be homosexual. As a boy, the narrator hero-worships him, and when they meet again years later Medlicott insists on treating him as an old friend, dining him at expensive restaurants or taking him on exhausting pub crawls. The narrator cannot make up his mind ...”

“... identified as the major obstacle in the way of Zionist fulfilment in the late 19th century, and David Ben-Gurion said in December 1947 that ‘there can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 per cent.’ Israel, he warned on the same occasion, would have to deal with this ‘severe’ problem with ‘a new ...”

“... and cathedral cloisters, but in 1685, when Philadelphia died, it was still common. Her husband may have wished to record his terrible loss in the dignity of an ancient language, but there was little point in listing the merits of Lady Mary if few other ladies, very few of her servants and fewer still among the poor could read about them. Two centuries ...”

“... he chose to disparage, not least the work of former friends and rival contemporaries. When David Sylvester once asked what precisely was so deplorable about it (a ‘kind of caution’ perhaps?), Bacon’s response was studiedly offhand. ‘Well,’ he drawled, clearing his throat. ‘Well . . . Illustration surely means just illustrating the image ...”

“... The song​  we hear at the beginning of David Leitch’s film Bullet Train is the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’. It’s a good song and all too relevant, but by the time the movie’s plot gets rolling it sounds more like a fragile wish than any sort of programme. ‘Fate is a name for my bad luck,’ a leading character says ...”

“... can read them later. There is also a flashback to a time when Zeena and her partner (Ian Keith; David Strathairn) were in vaudeville. Their act involved working a complicated code, where one of them would apparently be repeating questions from the audience but was actually signalling facts about the questioners. In the city, a different kind of trick is ...”

“... calling it ‘an academic romance’, and an epigraph from Hawthorne adds that authors of romances may ‘claim a certain latitude, both as to ... fashion and material’, which would not be permitted to anyone professing to write a novel. And, with a touch of the professor, Lodge also directs our attention to Patricia Parker’s admirable book Inescapable ...”

“... The vast David Hockney show at the Royal Academy (until 9 April) is deliberately overwhelming. What it most looks like is an overblown, hyped-up, hyperreal parody of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, that super-English annual gathering of the amateur art establishment, to which the buying public with large pocketbooks flock from the Home Counties and beyond ...”

“... made a Royal Academician in 2005 but he has remained a quiet man of British art in comparison with David Hockney or R.B. Kitaj, his contemporaries at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s. ‘Swan i’ (1964) The exhibition shows how decisively he transcends the well-worn term ‘postwar British artist’: Bowling is diasporic, resisting easy ...”

“... point in these diaries that the continuously intimate conversations Khrushchev had with Micunovic may have been part of a design to convince the West that relations between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were much better than they really were. Refuting this, Khrushchev himself insists that they are simply part of his design to put things between the two ...”

“... rock stars. The memoir the movie is based on, which has the same title, carries an epigraph from David Bowie: ‘Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do.’Well, perhaps this is not so comforting. A title card has told us the year – 1971 – and if we remember that a military dictatorship had been in power in the country since 1964, aided by ...”

“... nor useful. Kiefer’s work sticks to your imagination the way tar sticks to a shoe. You may not want it there, but you can’t scrape it off. You hear its zippy crackle follow as you try to walk away. It can make you seem to recall dreams you know you never had: dreams where you cross a clay field at the end of a grey day, your legs hardly able to ...”

“... patronage of a king proclaim a writer at ease with his own educational capital and the position it may earn him. As it turned out, Love’s Labour’s Lost was a landmark in Shakespeare’s accession to prosperity and prestige. It appears to have been the first of his plays to be acted before Queen Elizabeth, and it was later revived for James after ...”

“... nothing about them, because we learn almost nothing about Richards either. This glazed reticence may, however, tell us something in itself, especially if it is viewed as part and parcel of the public persona of the man in the middle of the Modern Movement. At this point, let me lay my own credentials on the table, since what follows stems in part from my own ...”

“... to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his long-time assistant David Dawson. But the baby had not caused offence, so was not painted out, with the result that a naked and strangely breasted Dawson is now seen feeding the child. Freud’s American dealer assumed the picture would be unsellable; it was bought by the first ...”