“... more classically Arcadian in its subjects and atmosphere, more expansive in its distances. ‘You may walk in Claude’s pictures and count the miles,’ Wilson declared, but to my eye his management of distance is superior to Claude’s, more subtle in its tonal range and aerial perspective. barr01_3618 Gallery The relative qualities of the two painters ...”

“... Slime is also phenomenological, ‘a thing in between a feeling and a description’. We may agree that mucus and mayonnaise have the same viscosity, but disagree as to whether this makes my sandwich disgusting. Cultural differences show up clearly in food, but they hide in other areas too. Slimy things are everywhere, but there is no universal ...”

“... in a new guise, so that we are forced to recognise that there was a flaw in the goal itself. This may mean coming to see that democracy can itself be a form of un-freedom, or that we must demand more than merely political democracy: social and economic life must be democratised too. In short, what we first took as a failure fully to apply a noble principle ...”

“... century of national politics are in crisis; an astonishing YouGov poll conducted at the end of May put both Labour and the Conservatives on 19 per cent, behind the Liberal Democrats and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. An Opinium poll subsequently put the Brexit Party out in front on 26 per cent. Farage’s outfit has adopted the model of a platform ...”

“... a gentlemanly job, and began his sea career immediately after leaving Hawkshead Grammar School. It may have been a peculiarity of the Wordsworth family that whereas the other sons sought employment and preferment in the ordinary way, it was assumed that the poet was owed a living from the outset. In The Prelude Wordsworth celebrates the freedom conferred by a ...”

“... is going to get us into all kinds of trouble, psychic and material. But partial, affective denial may be a loyalty to whatever the facts destroyed or replaced. Why should we let go mentally, in our stories, so to speak, of what we have already lost in every other sense? To refuse, at least initially, to accept the death of a person we love ...”

“... of food vouchers worth £35 a week. ‘Many asylum seekers come from communities where wealth may be stored in jewellery,’ explains the Home Office minister Mike O’Brien, ‘and it is right for us to take account of that wealth.’ ‘Is the minister suggesting,’ asks Diane Abbott MP, ‘that asylum seekers should sell their jewellery, perhaps their ...”

“... resumes his research with the hard-won and incompletely convincing insight that biography itself may be a kind of snuff movie. What is this novel saying about biographers and biographies? When the first thirty or so pages of The Biographer’s Tale were first published (in New Writing 8, 1999), the extract was called ‘Brief Lives’. So a good starting ...”

“... codex. As early as 125, what later became Biblical text already took the form of a book. The book may give way to the screen some time soon but it has been with us now for two thousand years – and de Hamel’s main argument is that it is essentially the product of our Biblical culture. So, the jagged triangle in the Rylands is the closest we can get to our ...”

“... because you can never tell, and both the Arab unity and the Muslim-Jewish co-operation he sought may always have been chimerical. That said, Anderson concludes, ‘it’s hard to imagine that any of this could possibly have produced a sadder history than what has actually transpired over the past century, a catalogue of war, religious strife and brutal ...”

“... of the Cold War it is time to start again. None of the old assumptions applies any longer. Russia may be difficult to deal with but it is not an enemy: we have relatively normal relations with it. The US now has strategic nuclear primacy over Russia: its chances of disabling Russian nuclear forces with a first strike are estimated at more than 90 per ...”

“... guilt, the court held that the pig be ‘strangled on a gibbet of wood’ so that ‘an example may be made and justice maintained’. Pigs were not the only culprits. The medieval courts of Europe, particularly those of France, appear to have dealt with a ‘miscellaneous crew’ of beasts, including ...”

“... or modern, who doesn’t abide by his own teachings. A mathematician who solves a famous problem may be a known scoundrel and liar, but mathematicians don’t come up with ethical injunctions for others to follow. If we were to discover that despite his exaltation of the rational part of the soul, Plato spent his days getting drunk and ogling young boys in ...”

“... save it. ‘When at a high level of state responsibility,’ he said in a televised interview in May, ‘you allow yourself to look a citizen in the eyes and lie to him, when you allow yourself to rig elections, to buy elections … is that what you call democracy?’ Whether Sanogo intended to save Mali’s democracy or confiscate it is an open ...”

“... off the stage, British politics (or perhaps one should say English politics, since Scotland may be going its separate, but equally parochial way) will be in the hands of a generation of late thirty and early fortysomethings, almost all of whom went to the same university at roughly the same time and studied the same subject. As well as the two ...”