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“... the materials that do survive – in particular, the two copies of the Canterbury Tales produced by the same scribe in the early 15th century. We know the scribe was a prolific copyist of Middle English poetry, probably a man called Adam Pinkhurst, and it seems possible that he had some connection to Chaucer. The earlier of the two manuscripts, the so-called ...”

“... By a happy chance I am reading The Count of Monte Cristo. It acclimatises one to the dramas and Oriental dreams which figure in the exhibition Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics (at Tate Britain until 11 May). It makes it easier to relish the dramatics of Horace Vernet’s Mazeppa, to see that there is more than nice observation of weather in Paul Huet’s picture of a lonely rider, Storm at the End of the Day ...”

“... macaw follow no fashion – they are born elegant and appropriately insulated. They cannot, season by season, startle with new patterns of fur or feathers. People can.We may, snake-like, shed worn-out clothes; we may become bored, disgusted or embarrassed by the way we look. Or, better, we may decide to ...”

“... it is as though a Rembrandt-like stickiness of paint or a Hals-like dash has been multiplied by some large factor.These signals of seriousness in the work are reinforced by what one reads of the life. Auerbach has worked in the same studio for most of it, has used friends and family as models, often painting the same ...”

“... There is always something new to look at. The endless steppe is, well, endless; it needs to be lit. So the titles of the Russian pictures tell you to think of time, weather and season rather than location: Morning on the Dniepr, Morning in the Country, The Rooks Have Returned, After the Rain, A Ploughed Field at Evening, Late Autumn, Forest View at ...”

“... to ‘define’ literature: it was the ‘theoretical naivety and innocence of system displayed by the literary establishment’ which made it ‘always vulnerable’ to the demolition which it suffered soon after at the hands of ‘structuralist and post-structuralist theorists’. The witnesses were not ‘defining literature’ but trying conscientiously ...”

“... intensity in such media ‘events’ as the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and the David Duke campaign. Conspiracy theories detailed the infiltration of American higher education by ‘politically correct’ militants, and lamented the takeover of the art world ...”

“... They were far from home and they were deeply patriotic. You could tell that they had been told by their selection committees, before embarking on the Atlantic crossing, that they should comport themselves as ambassadors and emissaries. But those local lawyers and Rotarians and Chambers of Commerce had not prepared them to hurry up, finish their studies and ...”

“... who is sometimes known in his field as Write-it-Wrong Elbow, liberated a few of the apostrophes by pulling off the adhesive tape. 13 January. The canonisation of Dame Iris proceeds apace and the BBC are now preparing to show on Omnibus extracts from a video taken from an interview carried out by an eminent ...”

“... the wall and make bilateral negotiations impossible. The complacent US public seems unperturbed by Bush’s failure so far to find a single WMD in Iraq, even if the much more disputatious British public was immediately up in arms (so to speak) about the remarkable Intelligence failures that were used to justify the invasion. To grasp the full extent of this ...”

“... with a promise of star treatment: ‘Lights. Camera. Action. Das Kapital. Now.’ Though written by a socialist, Leo Panitch, the piece was typical of the general approach to Marx and Marxism. It bowed at a distance to the prophet of capitalism’s ever ‘more extensive and exhaustive crises’, and restated several basic articles of his thought: capitalism ...”

“... Dome on Bugsby’s Marshes, talked confidentially to an unseen interrogator who appeared to be crouching on the floor of his chauffeured limousine as he drifted across London; and who remained, within earshot of an eavesdropped soliloquy, while the real PM perched in his office, alone with his compulsively agitated gizmos, grape-peelers, yoghurt ...”

“... though, needed to rest for 24 hours before it was broached – something her ladyship could hardly be expected to understand. But if the muddy brown liquid that hiccuped from the spigot would not serve the recalcitrant denizens of the hall, it might do for the help.Early in 1966, when I was 23 years old – married, with a baby, and a graduate student at ...”

“... of the journalist Anshel Pfeffer – looks increasingly like the embryo of a new world governed by atavistic fears, whose most malign symptom is the presidency of Donald Trump. Pfeffer, a correspondent for Haaretz, has written a biography of Benjamin Netanyahu as a way of explaining today’s Israel – by no means an ...”

“... and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print. But then ...”