“... by an independent commission for improving the quality of publicly funded advocacy, but Theresa May sacked him before he could put them into practice. Liz Truss showed barely any interest in the job. David Lidington came and went without a trace in just seven months. David Gauke, a relative fixture with a term of eighteen months, had to renationalise the ...”

“... Inspiring Walt Disney, now in the dark belly of the Wallace Collection (until 16 October), may seem like a clever way to lure enthusiasts for the popular entertainment of their childhood – together with their own children – into a museum, much of which is dedicated to the decorative art created for the wealthy few in 18th-century France. But in ...”

“... war. So exemplary is the clarity of their rich, varied and powerful argument that their hopes may well be realised. Good books about ethics and warfare – that is, books which can meet the military and political ‘realists’ on their own grounds, without sacrificing moral principle – are not as rare as they used to be. Gallie and Walzer come at once ...”

“... Journal editorial page had done their side a disservice by asserting that Romney would win (he may have believed them too: he didn’t write a concession speech). Everyone else was listening to the New York Times statistician Nate Silver, whose incessant poll-crunching put the likelihood of the president’s re-election around 90 per cent. With the ...”

“... 1510 and 1515 and is the finest in Jan Gossaert’s Renaissance at the National Gallery (until 30 May). A new catalogue raisonné, which includes all his work, not just what is shown here in London or what was seen in the companion exhibition in New York, persuades you that it was his masterpiece.* The painter’s attention is of the kind that lets no part of ...”

“... shot through with around ten million nerve endings, and by rubbing tusks on meeting, the narwhals may be passing on information about the salinity (and therefore propensity to freeze) of the water through which they have just passed; not aggressors, then, but Mercators. The horns may also be an aid to courtship; a positive ...”

“... I should take her by the elbow and see her safely back to the church she was made for. Yet one may never see her so clearly again. Mary, handsome, strong, leaning against the door frame, her great baby, more a child really, balanced on her hip, and the elderly, barefoot pilgrims she looks down at – all well lit, not seen as they are in the church, in the ...”

“... The remark is meant to sound tough and true, if a little worn out. In fact, although the character may be right about many places in reality, he couldn’t be more wrong about the world of this movie. Everyone has dozens of chances, and everyone screws up most of them.Marty Supreme is the second film Safdie has made without his usual co-director, his ...”

“... they aren’t usually allowed to use the same bathrooms and toilets as their employers). They may be poor relatives; or they may be adults from outside the family. They have no fixed hours, though in some cases they are given a day off every week or every fortnight. The government recognises their existence by providing ...”

“... but not made light of – such as the suggestion that Ricks’s enthusiasm for Little Gidding may be misplaced. It was Ricks’s defence of what he had called ‘the generous common humanity’ of the clichés in Little Gidding that Hill took particular objection to. ‘I would ask him,’ Hill riposted with some sting in Style and Faith, ‘to place his ...”

“... I take it, she means something like ‘unverifiable’, impossible to locate and scrutinise. It may be that she is asking here for more clarity than is necessary; as she knows, there are people who find psychological explanations useful, without doubting their own ultimate inscrutability. But by warning us away from an essentialist, psychological view of ...”

“... he relies on comes from income-tax returns: ‘The totals for London and the Home Counties may be taken as convenient shorthand or metaphors for commercial and financial-based incomes generated by the British middle classes, while the totals for Lancashire and Yorkshire may be taken as their equivalent for industrial ...”

“... or says that the fourth stanza of the poem ‘re-opens the ambiguities of the third’, which it may do in 1842, but not in 1832, where, besides the changes in the text, the order of the stanzas is reversed. Comparing ‘Mariana’ with ‘Mariana in the South’, Tucker states that when the southern Mariana ‘sees images pass her door in stanzas six and ...”

“... to ‘an Age’. To regard oneself as inhabiting a local, human-made and changeable realm may in some respects be disconcerting: it can also be exhilarating. The very instability presented in acknowledging that one lives at a particular period offers hope for future change, and encourages changes of focus in the present. The mobilities and ...”

“... decision-making often fail to grasp the complexity of judicial aims and the divergences that may exist between those aims and the myopic ends of the politicians for whom the judges probably vote. The judiciary may be reactionary, but it is not the Tory Party in horsehair, and it is eminently capable of biting the hand ...”