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“... Tiepolo,’ Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall write, ‘is not a difficult painter. He is accessible and easy to like.’ Well, up to a point. For example, while I did not find the Tiepolos in the Royal Academy’s exhibition of 18th-century Venetian art ‘difficult’ in any obvious way, I did not find them ‘easy to like’ either ...”

“... In a Foreword to this very substantial book Michael Ffinch says that G.K. Chesterton ‘was above all things a great champion of Liberty’. He goes on: ‘This being so, it has often come as a surprise that in religion Chesterton should have moved away from the Liberal Unitarianism of his childhood towards Catholicism ...”

“... but ‘the word gay wouldn’t have meant anything to them.’ ‘That means they moved in the straight world,’ the interviewer suggests, and Baldwin simply says: ‘They moved in the world.’ Closed categories were his enemies from first to last, and yet he seems himself to have been dazzled and bewildered by the categories of fame and success. They ...”

“... but is that to count in their favour?’ But an alarming number of others seem to have stepped straight out of the condescending dreams of D.H. Lawrence and Malcolm Lowry, all immemorial wisdom and ethnic patience. They say things like ‘The soul of Mexico is very old,’ or ‘The road has its own reasons and no two travellers will have the same ...”

“... precise, wry, lucid, analytic, subtly lyrical. What is delicately mocked, in this impeccably straight-faced prose, is writing itself: the ambitions and stiffness and poverty of writing, in the face of the multiple, shifting, unwritten world. Of course you have to write very well to be in a position to mock. We can all fail to say what we mean, any ...”

“... else. A stage direction in Fargo reads: ‘The police car enters with a whoosh and hums down a straight-ruled empty highway, cutting a landscape of flat and perfect white.’ The other remarkable performance in this movie, apart from McDormand’s, is that of William H. Macy as Jerry Lundergaard, a car salesman who owes a lot of money (he’s borrowed ...”

“... set in a preternaturally dark and teeming Brazil (a might-as-well-be Florida). Although, if it’s straight Florida you want, you’d probably still be better advised to read Carl Hiaasen or Joan Didion. Or Matthiessen or Conroy or Stevens. Or Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings or Zora Neale Hurston. Or the Master himself. The pieces (one doesn’t want to use the word ...”

“... day,’ we read. Here is ‘mute, dark, hungry Moscow’. Here are birch trees that stand ‘straight as martyrs’; clouds that race ‘like halfwits’; ‘taffeta darkness’; rainwater ‘tinged with cinnabar’. The point is not so much the originality of these evocations as their specificity, their representation of a will to defeat ...”

“... Yes, but it’s hard work. Conversely, do we have to believe that every form of strangeness leads straight into a horror movie, with no return? This is to bring cause and effect back with a vengeance, and to slot these wandering people back into an unequivocal story, almost certainly the wrong one. Finley asks a remarkable question about Jessie: ‘Had she ...”

“... of the soldier-macaque, whereas Attila fuels an industry of popular histories and fantasy novels, straight-to-video films and documentaries, all the while dispensing business secrets to would-be world conquerors in middle management. Mutatis mutandis, it has always been thus: Attila the exemplary demon, driven by imagined saints from the walls of cities that ...”

“... then a man in a domino emerged from an alley, caught his cloak about him with both hands, and made straight across the square. Andreas took a step forward and bowed. The domino raised his hat, and with it the half-mask fixed to the inside. There was a trustworthy look about the man; to judge from his bearing and manners, he belonged to the best ...”

“... was equal parts Old Hollywood and Brancusi mask, Lisa Marie was famous for her relationships with Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage – and for being Elvis’s daughter. Before her death, in 2023, of cardiac arrest caused by complications from weight-loss surgery, she had been recording tapes of material for a memoir. These recordings form the basis of From ...”

“... in Ireland now.’ August Wennerstrom, a Swedish pastor travelling with some of his flock, went straight to the third-class smoking-room. ‘We tried to get something to drink,’ he reported afterwards, ‘but the bar was closed. Nothing else to do, we got someone to play the piano and danced.’ There were 2227 people aboard the Titanic: 1522 lost their ...”

“... of Arabic,’ Ahmad says to the owner, grinning conspiratorially at us. ‘Speak Arabic with Pak Michael, go on! He speaks Arabic. Go on! With a beard like that in Yemen you’d perfume it; here you mothball it to get rid of the cockroaches!’ So much for the sacred beard, a sign of piety with the Prophet’s beard the exemplar. It is distinctively Arab ...”

“... than Harold Bloom? Well, if you take her word for it, it’s Camille Paglia, come to set the world straight on the burning issues of our time: tenured radicals, date rape, the aesthetic evolution of Madonna. The self-styled genius and warrior woman seized public attention with her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson ...”