“... close-framed, in Perspex, so that one saw only the actual image.’ After working together all day on trying to hang them, they were in despair. Returning in the morning she found that Fraser ‘had painted the entire place black – walls, ceiling, all the woodwork, everything was completely black. And so these little light, pale studies, very fragile ...”

“... Smirke, with what Pevsner called ‘high Victorian cruelty’, to house the Royal Academy. Charles Barry Jr and Robert Banks added the ranges that enclose the courtyard and house the Linnean, Geological and Astronomical Societies and the Society of Antiquaries. Solid Victorian temples to art and the life of the mind, they preserve something of the dignity, not ...”

“... for many years, his creed. Interestingly, this poem for Russell Davies, written while filming with Barry Humphries in Cardiff, is couched in rhyme royal, a stanza which is a Manx-cat version of ottava rima, though it may well predate it, having been used by Chaucer. Auden also decided on rhyme royal for ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, probably to avoid too direct ...”

“... in which technical expertise bears on it. Eating is something that everybody does, several times a day if they’re lucky. For those fortunate enough to decide what they want to eat, expertise can insinuate itself into the exercise of dietary choice. In the tradition of Galenic medicine that reigned from antiquity through much of the 19th century, food and ...”

“... the blacklist did not go far enough. He opposed civil rights legislation, supported Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Nonetheless, his movies through the early Sixties – Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1958) and Ford’s Liberty Valance (1962) are the last great ones – remained inside the Cold War consensus. Even his own epic production, The ...”

“... elsewhere alludes to Breuning’s testimony that Beethoven incessantly (and at all hours of the day and night) jotted down ideas for fear of forgetting them. The young Breuning is intrigued by the appearance of a Beethoven sketch-book, which he finds on a piece of furniture in Beethoven’s apartment (‘it was completely full of notes, written in fits and ...”

“... at the opening of Harold Pinter’s first play, The Room. ‘It was the alcoholics’ paradise,’ Barry Humphries writes in his introduction to Darren Coffield’s entertaining book.You merely ran up a slate. Later, much later, came the reckoning, but you never knew how they arrived at the astronomical total, and alkies like to pay more anyhow. It’s our ...”

“... the shadow defence secretary, essentially told Marr that she agreed with the general. Just another day in the war against Corbyn. The Sunday Times had previously run an anonymous interview with ‘a senior serving general’. ‘Feelings are running very high within the armed forces,’ the general was quoted as saying, about the very idea of a Corbyn ...”

“... collisions. Yet there is a crucial difference: finance inhabits the world of what the sociologist Barry Barnes calls ‘social-kind’ terms, not natural-kind terms. We do not ordinarily imagine that the flow of heat along a metal bar is affected by our beliefs about that flow. In finance, however, we cannot make the same presumption. Finance theory describes ...”

“... what Hutton calls the ‘new model of ancient Celticity’, introduced in 2010 by John Koch and Barry Cunliffe in Celtic from the West, sees the spread of Celtic languages as a consequence of the existence of an Atlantic trade route rather than ‘waves of invasion’. Trade doesn’t necessarily bring peace. Slave shackles have been found at Llyn Cerrig ...”

“... nobody can reasonably reject, a conclusion Rawls endorses, along with other writers like Brian Barry, T.M. Scanlon and Thomas Nagel. Geuss does not say much about this idea, beyond noting that those, like Habermas, who assimilate politics to a seminar discussion miss the urgency of political decision-making. Getting a decision often matters more than how ...”

“... this is the 25th volume of Ezra Pound’s highly distinctive correspondence to see the light of day. The first selection of his letters, edited by D.D. Paige and culled from the years 1907-41, was published in 1950, when Pound was four years into what would be a 12-year sojourn in St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, to which he’d been confined ...”

“... the country forward or drag it backward. The news updates led with Obama’s visit to a mosque the day before, and followed with the Zika virus. This was liberal public radio, and the next segment was about sexism in the technology industry. When the signal faded I switched over to AM and found the right-wing talk-show host Laura Ingraham asking Donald ...”

“... he identified himself with his Lord in death, in burial and in resurrection. When he came out that day he had lost many of his friends, he had lost many of the people that once associated themselves with him in the gospel. He realised that there was a reproach with the gospel. My father, as I told you, was uncompromising in his character. He did not care. The ...”

“... Straight after the coup Kim Jong Pil, with the help of the CIA, set up the KCIA, which, from that day to this, has remained the real power centre of the Korean regime. One key Moonie sympathiser, Steve Kim, left the Army immediately to join the KCIA and became Kim Jong Pil’s indispensable aide, acting as the intermediary between the KCIA and CIA. Another ...”