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“... Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden are the four volumes of Refugee Tales, directed by the poet David Herd and Anna Pincus of the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group. The project, which has been running since 2016, pairs contemporary writers with former indefinite detainees, retelling their stories and taking the Canterbury Tales as a model. It is a powerful ...”

“... of Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration might look like? Turn to Ingres’s portrait of Amédée-David, Comte de Pastorait – ‘a promising bureaucrat’ under Napoleon who, by 1826, when the portrait was painted, had become Conseiller d’Etat Extraordinaire. His black uniform, brilliantly set off by the red ribbon and white enamel star of the Légion ...”

“... about fashion and its presentation. Rapture: Art’s Seduction by Fashion since 1970 and David LaChapelle’s photographs both run until 23 December. An exhibition at the V&A of Gianni Versace’s clothes runs until 12 January.* All three tangle with the paradoxes of taste and exclusivity. LaChapelle embraces Truman Capote’s ‘Good taste is the ...”

“... as from their kinetic extravagance. Auerbach’s achievement is formidable. Unlike his teacher, David Bomberg, whose diverse stylistic excursions seem to test his talent as though he feared he had missed its true direction, Auerbach has followed a single line. His life’s work hangs together – the most recent pictures developing ideas about painting ...”

“... In some cases the viewer becomes like the figure that stands dwarfed in the foreground of Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea, which is reproduced in the catalogue alongside Kleist’s reaction to it: ‘It was like someone having their eyelids cut off.’ Even landscape can be painfully revealing. The German connection is important, but if one lists ...”

“... older books, was hardly read outside the universities, and reported a drop in enrolments. David Lehman’s Signs of the Times similarly notes the ‘disquieting fact that the number of students electing to major in literature has steadily declined over the last twenty years’. The question of ‘theory’ is bound up with this, since, in Lehman’s ...”

“... 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 by feminists, homosexuals and ethnic minorities. In short, for Americans who watch ...”

“... group and Hillary Clinton, the case for a straightforward National Health Bill was put by Dr David Himmelstein. As he recalls the exchange:It was evident Hillary was thinking a lot about politics. Can you realistically tell me, she asked, that there are any big powers that support ‘single payer’ and that can take on the insurance industry’s ...”

“... a man with wild red hair (looking like Léonide Massine in The Red Shoes) who brings Livesey and David Niven tea in the country house where some amateurs are rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This house seems to be set on a series of steps which, though the film was shot in the studio, relates it to Hardwick Hall and also to the dream sequences that ...”

“... to fabricate a first bomb,’ and eight or nine kilograms for subsequent ones. According to David Albright, one of the best and most reliable independent experts, ‘the most credible worst-case estimate’ is that the North may have between 6.3 and 8.5 kg of reprocessed plutonium. In other words, the CIA’s educated guess, endlessly repeated in the ...”

“... the landmarks of Marxian economic thinking include Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1972), David Harvey’s Limits to Capital (1982), Giovanni Arrighi’s Long 20th Century (1994) and Robert Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), all expressly concerned with the grinding tectonics and punctual quakes of capitalist crisis. Yet little trace ...”

“... thanks to propaganda campaigns spearheaded by Bullingdon Club toffs like Boris Johnson and David Cameron, underwent significant revision. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the horse path alongside the Regent’s Canal was mud, and forbidden to pedestrians and cyclists alike, I rode to my gardening job in Limehouse on a market wreck bought for ...”

“... a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage were masked (and painfully complicated) by the emotional ...”

“... about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the monastic self-discipline of David Ben-Gurion to the gluttony of Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu comes across as a hollow figure: a ‘marketing man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be avoided, or his survival ...”

“... too much John Hoyer Updike. In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly proud, after all, of a penis that has ...”