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“... posed in the studio. The subjects are deceit and seduction: one (known only from copies) shows a young cavalier being taught how to cheat at cards; in another a young cavalier has his palm read, and ring removed, by a pretty gypsy girl. These pictures were enormously influential, creating a whole new class of cabinet ...”

“... my mother was as I had never seen her, incredibly beautiful. Getting married, to a handsome young man in the schmatter trade. But under the beauty, her eyes shone steely. She was on her way. It was uncanny. The beauty and the cold eyes. This was her last chance, handing me over to a slightly famous writer. There were possibilities, but also the ...”

“... novels, but the mood has grown nastier. Brenda hooks up with Beaver, an indifferent and snobbish young man who is universally deplored and whom even Brenda recognises as second-rate, and demands a divorce. The beau monde is charmed by so fantastic a romance, and a broken Tony seeks to be obliging; but after various humiliations he puts his foot down and ...”

“... and torture are daily events, and a military coup seems to be in the offing. Galip, a young lawyer whose speciality is defending political prisoners, returns home to find that his wile Rüya has left him. His instinctive response is to pretend that nothing has happened – Rüya is simply too ill to leave the apartment or come to the telephone. He ...”

“... saw that this was indeed ‘only a façade’, but it’s one that Christopher Banks, the young English detective who is the starchy narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, can’t see behind. He remembers leaving Shanghai as a boy with the discomfiting feeling that the city might never reveal the mystery of his mother and father’s strange ...”

“... that a precarious balance must be kept. As the person walks (or sails, or climbs, or swims like Roger Deakin in the delightfully graphic and immediate Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain), mental notes will inevitably be scribbling themselves; the telling will be flawed if the impulse of the journey is merely to fulfil a book ...”

“... not a good-time girl (except in the sense that she just wanted a good time like any healthy young thing) but a pawn – no, that’s pawn – in the Cold War. Stephen Ward, you may recall, was osteopath to the great and good. There was almost no one in society he didn’t massage. When he wasn’t manipulating them, he was sketching them, having ...”

“... more than a week of protests. The activists decide to disperse, but a mural remains at the site: a young girl with a spade has just planted a sapling; she is holding a plant label with the XR logo, an hourglass in a circle. The piece, which has all the distinguishing features of a Banksy, borrows a line from Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life ...”

“... within it seem both realistic and safe. No possible turn of a Ransome story would allow John, Roger, Susan and Titty to be embarrassed by their mother’s breasts showing through a tight sweat shirt. Many heroes are a cut above Adrian in talent. K.M. Peyton’s Pennington is a rough diamond and gets into trouble with the police, but he is also a concert ...”

“... literature; others called it ‘anecdote’, which sounded trivial. Clark has not gone as far as Roger Fry, who considered that the superior way of looking at Raphael’s Transfiguration was to forget that it represented anything, so that one could engage more easily in the ‘pure contemplation of the spatial relations of plastic volumes’. He has never ...”

“... through rhythms of highlights and darks. The canvas should be analogous to greater ensembles: as Roger de Piles wrote, establishing the principle in 1708, ‘All the world’s entities tend to unity … just as politics refers everything to the government of a state.’ A centred composition might thus have statist resonances, serving as a rebuke to ...”

“... struck, wearing a coonskin cap for his portrait in Paris, or appearing in Philadelphia as a young upstart with two loaves of bread tucked under his arm, the original poor American boy about to make good. One of the leading historians of early American history during the last half-century, Edmund Morgan has, like Franklin, demonstrated great ...”

“... bande, broderie) and ‘c’s (circulaire, cartonné, cordon). In the Q&A that followed the talk, Roger Bismut, in what could be seen as either wild-eyed bait-taking or mocking overextension of Ricardou’s décryptage, unveiled a series of veau (veal) allusions he claimed were also running through the novel. To Bismut’s intervention Ricardou approvingly ...”

“... man who doesn’t like losing a game at the bowling alley. ‘It is difficult to explain today,’ Roger Ebert wrote in 2003, ‘how much Bobby Dupea meant to the film’s first audiences.’ Ebert remembers the premiere at the New York Film Festival, ‘the explosive laughter, the deep silences, the stunned attention … and then the ovation’. What they’d ...”

“... Waltz), the head of Spectre and by coincidence both the son and the murderer of a man who took the young Bond under his wing. Oberhauser is operating a contraption that threatens to deprive Bond of his facial recognition abilities by driving a pair of pins into the sides of his skull – a painful operation in its initial stages, as indicated by Craig’s ...”