“... and fugue by Bach, and groaning like Glenn Gould. She tells him their father has had a stroke, may not live long, and Bobby should go and see him. We perceive the story of estrangement instantly, because it’s the basic relation of father and son in all American stories of this kind. Maybe Dupea will go up to Washington State, maybe he won’t. But he ...”

“... W.1, and others. The translations were just as elastic as these cartoon-rubber composites. In the Robert Lowell version actually used by the Sunday Times, ‘Spleen’ opens: I’m like the king of a rain-country, rich but sterile, young but with an old wolf’s itchSteiner’s green-inked envelopes, on the other hand, contained openings like: I am like the ...”

“... Gallery The curators of her first major solo exhibition in Britain (at Tate Liverpool until 31 May) would rather focus on her diverse practice than her biography, but it’s impossible to make sense of her art without it. The only daughter of a wealthy Lancashire family, Carrington was repeatedly expelled from the Catholic boarding schools her tycoon ...”

“... to adopt a minimum ‘secular’ curriculum, and to deny support to extreme sectarian schools. It may not be accidental that this is happening at a time when the settlement ethos, like the place of religion in Israeli society, is being re-evaluated. A left-wing agronomist I know, playing devil’s advocate, argued that ‘Zionism was always about expansion ...”

“... Crusade, the only eyewitness view from Byzantium, in which she portrays the Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemond with horrified fascination. In a period that witnessed the gradual loss of Asia Minor to the Turks, the emergence of Venice and Pisa as maritime powers and the formulation of holy war ideologies in western Christendom and ...”

“... Dostoevsky went to inspect it: he was less persuaded that it was so humane. A prisoner may have had their own space, but that meant they lived in semi-solitary confinement. Pentonville was a holding pen: prisoners would soon be sent to other prisons or shipped to the other side of the world to see out their incarceration. I saw a form for a ...”

“... You wanted us to be more British than the British!’Leroy comes top of his trainee class, quoting Robert Peel’s philosophy of policing to his teachers. His superiors ask him to be the face of a recruitment campaign. But when he is dispatched to his own North London neighbourhood he is forced to confront the reality of his institutional role. On his first ...”

“... and forty years later, Nicholas’s grandson and namesake became a singing boy in the household of Robert Cecil, where he learned the lute and viol. The first of young Lanier’s (for want of a better term) diplomatic missions came in 1611, when Cecil sent him to Venice. Musicians and artists were often used as couriers and spies, and Lanier had the advantage ...”

“... Tebbit said, barring a recession, he could not see Labour being returned again. In that, he may be right. As Peter Jenkins explains, the Labour Party may only be able now to hope for about 35 per cent of the vote. There are fewer trade-unionists and council-house tenants, and the proportion of public-sector employees ...”

“... Revolutionary empire’ is a bold term which may be taken in various senses. Like the Roman and Arab before it, but on a grander scale, the British Empire was a powerful force in drawing peoples out of their separate existences, pulling the world together into one jarring and explosive whole. Its expansion had transforming effects on Britain itself, and through it on Europe ...”

“... inscriptions increasingly unintelligible to the modern inhabitants: visited occasionally, it may be, as a pissoir, a species of visit naturally brief. It is wicked to quote this delicious paragraph, one of the many that can be quoted, if only because it is so supremely quotable, but even more so because its sensational image ...”

“... of answered prayer. What a joy to hear from Mr Beggs of a £1,000 gift for the pulpit. Hallelujah! May that pulpit be the storm centre of the great hurricane of revival. Oh for a tempest of power, a veritable cyclone of blessing, Lord, let it come! Eight years later, the preacher rose up in that enormous pulpit and waved a copy of a historical study which had ...”

“... joke continues to run because James is worried about the worldly obscurity his stylistic obscurity may end in, and the comic heightening of their contrasted fortunes flatters even as it caricatures her. They share the joke, but it in no way settles their differences. In 1913, worried at James’s anxieties about money, she tried to get up a $5000 birthday gift ...”

“... on paper – a foretaste of an exhibition devoted to Freud prints and drawings which will open in May at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and will then travel to four other British venues and on to three museums in the United States of America.* Much of this article arises from conversations which I have had with the artist whilst writing on the early drawings ...”

“... as well as being ultimately pointless. The monetarist sees himself as a moralist, whatever bishops may think. All this led Friedman to conclude that variations in output, employment and (crucially) prices will be minimised by the adoption of a firm ‘monetary rule’. This involves a clear and irrevocable government commitment to expand the money supply at a ...”