“... of the harbour at Belle-Ile, broadly painted in bright colours, marks the influence of John Peter Russell, the Australian artist, who’d been a friend of Van Gogh. At the end of that year Matisse painted The Dinner Table – quite big, more than three feet by four – a late Impressionist interior, innocuous enough one might think, yet the first in a ...”

“... electromagnetic spectrum, at which intelligent civilisations might seek to communicate with us. Frank Drake, an astronomer at a newly established radio astronomy observatory in West Virginia, reasoned along similar lines. In 1960 he conducted his own search of the skies, hoping to catch some telltale sign of intelligence chiming in at the special ...”

“... and ‘the worm’s-eye view of life’ in seaside postcards. He was hardly concerned with Frank Richards as a novelist or (despite his essay’s title) the art of Donald McGill. A better reason for paying attention to humble work is to identify its virtues. At worst, this can become highbrow slumming – overpraising incompetence like an eager nursery ...”

“... enormously to Gable’s individuality, but plays havoc for ever after with the moment when he’s frank with Vivian Leigh. You could argue that our tendency to demand when as soon as we think if has been responsible for the development of civilisation, and I daresay there are those who admire the first hominid who looked at a rock and saw a tool in it, but ...”

“... Nine hundred years ago, a celebrity philosopher fell in love with his star student and seduced her. Peter Abelard’s once brilliant lectures grew tepid, while his love songs placed the name of Heloise on every tongue. Passionate letters flew, and the Parisian gossip mill went into overdrive – until pregnancy, as so often, betrayed the secret ...”

“... to become residuals (and hence very difficult to relate to anything real). Solow and Temin are frank: ‘The usual routine, in the absence of anything better, is to treat technology as the ultimate residual ... This is particularly unsatisfying to the historian.’ So it is that many historians, while finding the national income aggregative approach ...”

“... War. In his new book, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, the inordinately prolific and widely admired Peter Gay has much to say about the creativity of the moderns but surprisingly little about their negativity. He conceives of Modernism in older terms as principally an intellectual and artistic grouping bent on liberation rather than as a broader frame of mind ...”

“... well-meaning Judenrat functionary, the aesthetically sensitive but murderous SS-Oberscharführer. Frank Rich’s New York Times review dropped the curtain with apt cruelty: ‘Ghetto is almost perverse in its ability to make the true nightmare of our century ring completely false.’ Not quite a radical (he isn’t Hanoch Levin, or Yitzhak Laor), Sobol has ...”

“... May 1982, even if their owner Rupert Murdoch so wished – which he emphatically doesn’t. Peter Riddell of the Financial Times has taken an educated interest, but he is also in the House of Commons Lobby, and you cannot expect Lobby journalists to allow themselves to be perceived as part of a campaign. Paul Foot of the Mirror writes as pungently as ...”

“... His innocence was confirmed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and also by Bishop Peter Storey in his recent and very frank autobiography, I Beg to Differ: Ministry amid the Teargas.*In 1989 Winnie ordered the murder of Abu Baker Asvat, her own physician and a popular Indian community doctor, who would have ...”

“... power. She was philosophically well informed and combined intense moral seriousness with a frank sensuality – always, it seems, sublimated: she appears to have gone to bed neither with Constant, nor with his uncle. She probably chose Charrière more to escape than fulfil her sexuality. As was so often the case for 18th-century women ...”

“... the news of his marriage. And then the two of them, each recently married, busily continue their frank correspondence. Eighteen months later, Schumpeter is ready to provide the detailed advice on sexual technique for Stojan and Mia that she has solicited. The curtailment of these exchanges followed all too soon. Mia and Stojan Bicanski were shot in ...”

“... of the rise and present institutional character of English Studies. A similar case was argued by Peter Widdowson and his contributors in the ‘New Accents’ volume Re-Reading English. It is hardly surprising that their arguments were met with great hostility by those (not only ‘Leavisites’) who continue to believe in the vital role of English as a ...”

“... to the second volume of their Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker point out that the nine-year run of the Dial alone amounts to ‘around 10,500 pages of text and 1200 pages of adverts, assuming an average of 300 words per page; this equals some 3.1 million words to read … about equivalent to ...”

“... of his rage at intrusions into his privacy, and one remembers him forcing the withdrawal of John Peter’s article from Essays in Criticism because it suggested a homosexual element in his relationship with Jean Verdenal. Lyndall Gordon reports a conversation with Mary Trevelyan which makes him seem mildly amused about this imputation, but his first reaction ...”