“... past to assume, first, that we can confidently identify something called lesbian sexuality (or, more generally, homosexuality); second, that this form of sexuality has always existed (largely repressed and hence mute in earlier ages, now in the 20th century explicit and manifest); and consequently, third, that it has a history? We can get a sense of what is ...”

“... Benjamin, but it was clear that for Berger the difficulties of a painter of our time involved more than lack of technique or talent. It was a matter of how art meshed with the other cogs in the machine of history. Picasso could be a genius without being a great painter, if the possibility of greatness was precluded by the nature of the world he had been ...”

“... escaped. With battlefields turned beneath the plough, the countryside entered an era of more fundamental change prompted by improved communications, as illustrated by canals and turnpikes, and by the redistribution of land through Parliamentary enclosure. Side by side with these changes, the country mansion came into its own, with landscape ...”

“... having stripes affords camouflage and, all else being equal, tigers that are camouflaged have more viable offspring than tigers that don’t. But bear in mind that the adaptivity of a phenotypic trait is its contribution to fecundity in the environment in which it was selected; not (or not necessarily) in the environment that it currently occupies. A ...”

“... Another antiquary who was at Hougoumont, John Gage (1786-1842), left an account that is more personal and more chilling than Scott’s, in a journal kept during a visit that was, for him too, a first taste of foreign travel. Gage was 29 in the summer of 1815. From an old-established family of Suffolk gentry he was ...”

“... many women in famous movements) she wasn’t the first to get noticed. After two decades and four more books with small presses, Wesleyan University Press put forward a fine selected poems, Veil, in 2001. In 2009 her tenth book, Versed, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The same things that make her work easy to recognise make ...”

“... of the difficulty of translating that experience into text. The book’s three sections unfold more like a dialectical argument than a fictional narrative. If there is a story here, it’s about the limits of language.Appropriately, Goetz begins with an ellipsis (the rapid d-d-d of a drum machine firing at 150 beats per minute):… and came up to me in ...”

“... of an oddity. Unlike the other masterpiece hunters of the late 19th century, Huntington was more of a taxonomer, acquiring hundreds of thousands of objects to create ‘a broad outline without duplication’ of Spanish and Hispanic art and culture. He wanted, as he put it, to ‘capture the soul of Spain in a museum’ and, in May 1904, he founded the ...”

“... publication of Pynchon’s immense Gravity’s Rainbow, during which time exegesis has continued more or less unabated. It is accompanied by tireless speculation as to what the author could be up to next, where he was, indeed who he was. Compared with Pynchon, J.D. Salinger is a publicity-hunter. One daring scholarly conjecture, that these authors are one ...”

“... FAS, which must make any classicist look for NEFAS. It is doubtful whether any of these have done more than waste a little more public money. When these remedies fail, we get scapegoating, as illustrated by John Major’s recent assault on ‘outmoded politically correct ways of teaching’ and get quantification, in the ...”

“... curated by Martin Postle and Robin Simon. It is a magnificent show, the first on this scale for more than thirty years. It will be at Cardiff until 26 October, and it is accompanied by a sumptuous catalogue, the fullest, most faithfully reproduced collection of colour reproductions of Wilson’s painting there will ever be in book form, accompanied by a ...”

“... feeling ran high. He swore loudly and often, devised his own peculiar costume (nautical, more or less), and wasn’t too careful about personal hygiene. No one thought he was a gentleman, a fact that didn’t trouble him in the least. His erratic behaviour eventually turned into insanity, probably resulting from syphilis caught during his rowdy years ...”

“... finished reading these two biographies I was very bored indeed. Almost everyone I know has had a more interesting life than Gibran; even I am having a more interesting life than he had. The biographers have done their best but I should guess that they, too, have had more interesting ...”

“... Time has a way​ of turning radicals into authorities. Thomas Aquinas was provocative during his lifetime because he sought to ground Christian theology in Aristotelian philosophy. Marx was exiled, Socrates poisoned. Moses Maimonides, known in the Jewish tradition by the honorific ‘Rambam’ (for Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, his real name), was celebrated centuries after his death as a towering figure in both philosophy and law, but in his own day was a controversial figure ...”

“... composer’s visits to London between 1958 and 1965, occupy over half the book. Although there are more sketches than seems necessary, they capture marvellously the hunched, almost repressed posture characteristic of the composer (even as a younger man), and thus lend support to some of Keller’s psychological hypotheses. This physical attitude is all the ...”