“... 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 ...”

“... is a very delicate time,’ we are told in Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (1965), and again in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation. None of that ‘a long time ago’ stuff, especially since we’re not talking about the past. The action takes place in the first months of the year 10191. The year is also mentioned in Denis Villeneuve’s new version, which ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Troubling’: that’s the word chosen by Penelope Curtis, the new director of Tate Britain, in her preface to the catalogue for Migrations, the gallery’s recently opened exhibition (it closes on 12 August). She’s referring to the name of the institution she heads. The launch of Tate Modern in 2000 gave Tate curators the thankless and well nigh incoherent task of demarcating which of their holdings belonged to a story about a specific nation and which to a story about value systems in general ...”

“... of the Alps: the ‘Man, Myth and Sensual Pleasures’ of the catalogue’s title are represented by the heavily muscled, well-fleshed figures derived from classical sculpture that Gossaert painted from his return from Rome until his death in 1532. The thin, almost emaciated naked bodies of earlier Flemish crucifixions and martyrdoms, and the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Or you could – virtually speaking – sit in a quiet corner by yourself and read the newspaper. The possibilities are endless. The web browser as we know it, with hyperlinks you can follow simply by clicking on them, drop-down menus, scroll bars and – crucially – pictures, was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Collection, Poussin’s A Dance to the Music of Time has been taken down into the basement. It can be found there until 5 February, holding a position of honour in Dancing to the Music of Time, an exhibition about the life and work of Anthony Powell. The painting is powerful but decorous. Apollo’s chariot, high in the sky, drives away the clouds of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Household, whose tedious task it now is to ascertain the manner of Diana’s death. Entirely by coincidence, Burgess will also preside over the inquest into the death of Dodi Fayed, because Fayed is buried on the family estate at Oxted, in Surrey, and Burgess is the Surrey Coroner as well as the Coroner of the Queen’s Household. It’s not his job to ...”

“... media, though particularly the BBC, expressing the view that ‘journalism in this country could be one of the causes of social malaise because of its aggression towards those in power in civil society.’ Many of Lloyd’s criticisms of the BBC are hard to disagree with – a wearisome focus on personality and celebrity, a deficit of serious current affairs ...”

“... fortune through some startling and, on occasion, clandestine publishing and movie contracts, as David Reynolds has shown in his riveting In Command of History. Then there is self-justification after retirement, which almost always produces memoirs of numbing boredom: I assume – or hope – that no one alive has actually read every page of all the volumes ...”