“... He’s the strongish, silent type who won’t complain if there are no croissants at breakfast. He may not succumb to the t-shirt, but he’s busy having been there, done that. He can be moved by a spectacular view at the end of a dreadful day. He believes that nothing should come easy, there must be endemic hassle and haggle from dawn to dusk. And because the ...”

“... his novel.’ Whether Chris’s novel is worth Rowland’s obsession with it is unclear. We may be tempted to discount Rowland’s conviction (driven as it is by self-tormenting jealous horror) that the book proves the boy’s literary mastery, but the narrator, omniscient and neutral to the point of slackness, seems to agree with Rowland’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at all. Proust himself could be more accommodating, and at one point implies that almost anything may be paradise if it keeps us out. The life of the Duchess of Guermantes, the narrator says, ‘appeared to me to be a paradise I would never enter’. Scott Moncrieff, the earlier and best-known translator of Proust, is in this case quite literal about the ...”

“... The 2007 presidential election – the first round is on 22 April, with the run-offs on 6 May – has moved matters along at a quicker pace than even ACLEFEU optimists could have hoped. The electoral register for the presidential elections, and for the elections to the National Assembly in June, closed at the end of last year. Since then the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the other affords the environment amid which the growth takes place, by which natural tendencies may be strengthened or thwarted or wholly new ones implanted. Experts don’t like to use this language much any more, but Galton’s handy words allow us to stand back and get some perspective on debates that have been going on for a very long time, and thus to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... next research project. One of the reasons breaking up with someone by text message or on Facebook may not be a good idea is the difficulty of judging tone. Take the sad case of Halle and Doug (‘Halle’ is the pseudonym of one of Gershon’s interviewees). While they were going out, they had a running joke, conducted largely by text message, based on the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Richter’s portraits (an exhibition of them runs at the National Portrait Gallery until 31 May) are pictures of photographs. Pictures of photographs, not pictures based on photographs, which is how you would describe them if the photograph took the place of a preparatory drawing. The effect is nothing like that of a painting which, placed alongside its ...”