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“... Global warming has got scary, industrialised agriculture makes me angry and I’m delighted to be living in a green moment, with Labour and the Tories both desperate to appear the more eco-friendly party. On the other hand, the craze for ethical living relies rather heavily on its own kind of consumerism and being green can seem merely a question of where ...”

“... from the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1874 aged 65, but was leader and prime minister again by 1880, and quit his fourth premiership on a point of principle in 1894 aged 84, impatient, indignant, and half-blinded by a ginger biscuit thrown at him by an angry woman during a rally in ...”

“... Exactly 146 interviews later, John le Carré, our premier narrative spook-meister, exhibits, by his own admission, that knack whereby the memory fails and the lie takes over. There is something in his tone that advises us not to believe him too much. The interview took place in 1997, more than thirty years after he left MI6, but he admits to ‘a ...”

“... central character announces in Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), released in a new digital transfer by the Criterion Collection. A local antique dealer wants to get away, to Nepal maybe. When told that Nepal is all antiques, she says she thinks she’ll try Morocco. The film itself doesn’t seem to share these moods at all, it can’t get enough of the 1960s ...”

“... Le Grand Jury, Marine Le Pen, leader of the Rassemblement National, said: ‘I want the veil to be banned in all public spaces.’On 23 October, on the television show CNews, Eric Zemmour, a writer and journalist, mentioned the general who led the French conquest of Algeria: ‘When General Bugeaud arrives in Algeria, he begins to slaughter Muslims, and ...”

“... 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 ...”