“... reason Tito lived so long in his last illness was that no one in the Presidential Council dared be the first to suggest that the various life-supporting machines should be switched off. Maybe in the end someone dared. Or maybe Tito, whose body in life had done so much to reconcile the politically irreconcilable in ...”

“... about 90 per cent of women, were illiterate. Proportions varied from region to region. In London by the end of the 17th century illiteracy may have been down to two-thirds or a quarter; for women about a half. There were fluctuations over time: a rapid growth in literacy immediately after the Henrician Reformation and again in the early years of ...”

“... Herszage), out on the town with her friends, is stopped, frisked and almost arrested by the police. Still, the film hangs on to its jollity for quite a while. We leave the beach – the Paiva family lives just across the road – to continue partying in a house. And then other houses. It’s all samba and bossa nova and the memories of rock ...”

“... a maker’s pains, it dawned upon me that we must have heard the Saga of Burnt Njal ... Pressed by the need to pass the story between his teeth and clarity it, he had used us. Morris’s open-heartedness, his shyness, his reckless treatment of the furniture, his concentration on whatever he had in hand as though the universe contained no other possible ...”

“... from, and in a sense complementary to, American Sublime, another celebration of wilderness, which David Craig wrote about in the last issue of the LRB.Fulton has made many walks of many kinds in many places over the last thirty years. But because a walk must exist in the present, and take place elsewhere, all he has to offer in the gallery are wall ...”

“... profound but not fully explained. The religious feel of things at White Cube is intensified by the character of the gallery building: a simple prism of white and grey which stands in the middle of a cobbled yard, as many small churches and chapels do in close-built towns and cities. It has the severity and simplicity of rooms specially designed for ...”

“... of art is on the whole a private matter and chattering crocodiles of schoolchildren need not be a serious barrier to contemplation. In fact, much is gained from the fairground tilt the mix of the committed and the casual gives the atmosphere of the place. It has, in particular, contributed to the great success of installations in the Turbine Hall, which ...”

“... as it does in Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019). Though the obvious does occasionally have to be explained. As Michael Corleone says in The Godfather Part II, ‘if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.’ It’s an accident, of course, that another Corleone is played by Robert De Niro, the ...”

“... Death, Roni Horn’s retrospective at Museum Ludwig in Cologne (until 11 August), you’re flanked by 96 photographs of her niece Georgia. The two grids of 48 seem to match until you’ve swivelled back and forth a few times and started noting certain fine disparities. Georgia’s grin slips, her head tilts, she peers at us through different holes in the slice ...”

“... onto the brown strip of beach. A couple of women slouched over baskets of mangos. A boy wandered by to ask for money, then posed for a photo, droop-lidded and smirking, his dog-tags glinting in the twilight. Shiny SUVs with corporate insignia piled up along the loading ramp behind me, glamorous, outsized and out of place. Against the trace of the hills on ...”

“... this is still what her friends call her. Marty Melcher, her third husband and manager, appears to be the only person close to her who actually referred to her as Doris Day; he insisted on using both names. The transition from birth name to celebrity persona is common enough: Frances Gumm became Judy Garland; Lucille LeSueur became Joan Crawford; Norma Jeane ...”

“... Some novels are met by such a hurricane of hostile criticism that they sink out of sight. Only word of mouth, the contrary opinion running from reader to reader, can occasionally bring them to the surface again. To the End of the Land has the opposite problem. It arrived on a foaming wave of praise which, when they actually get down to its pages, will leave many readers puzzled ...”

“... and repeatedly reject the lessons of Thatcherite economics. Yet at the root of her puzzlement, by a further irony, was her own misunderstanding of Smith. It was not simply that the electorate north of the border had betrayed its free-marketeering heritage, but that Thatcher’s hero was far from the proto-Thatcherite she and her advisers assumed him to ...”

“... sad joke of his career was that his fame outlived his success; after Red River, he couldn’t even be anonymous in failure. The shape of Clift’s career has a tragic symmetry: eight early films, from Red River to Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953), and then, after Edward Dmytryk’s Raintree County (1957), eight late films from Vincent ...”

“... mad for love. To recover his lost wits, his comrade-in-arms Astolfo travels to the Moon, guided by St John the Evangelist. On the Moon all that is lost on Earth can be found. The favours of princes show up as inflated bellows, ladies’ charms as limed snares; lost wits are stored in individually labelled ...”