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“... The general election​ of 2015 will be unique in contemporary British history for coming at the end of a fixed-term Parliament. This has had the predictable consequence of giving us a run-up to the election so protracted that it has already begun, with the parties titivating their policies, importing electoral gurus and covertly making plans to book advertising space ...”

“... posters for it. Well, there are compelling moments in the movie but they keep losing their allure by reuse; they just go on telling us there is a mystery while the posters picture it. The posters show Gary Oldman as George Smiley – or rather they show him as Alec Guinness made a little taller, thinner, cooler. The trick, it seems, is to acknowledge ...”

“... reading of a bill that threatens imprisonment for anyone who questions Israel’s claim to be a Jewish and democratic state. The private member’s bill, proposed by Zevulun Orlev of the Jewish Home party, calls for up to one year’s imprisonment for anyone who publishes ‘a call that negates the existence of the ...”

“... In July last year, two months after assuming his duties as minister for universities and science, David Willetts granted university status to BPP University College of Professional Studies, making it only the second private institution in England, after the University of Buckingham, to be given the power to award degrees ...”

“... In July, David Freud, the Conservative peer in charge of changes to the benefit system, wondered aloud in the Lords whether the boom in food banks was ‘supply-led’ or ‘demand-led’. Two years ago, 70,000 people used food banks and now 347,000 do. ‘What is a supply-led food bank?’ another peer wanted to know ...”

“... the creators of public sculpture are no longer part of the mainstream, their work likely to be resented. The exceptions tend to be makers of large, simple pieces. Yet Henry Moore, whose work epitomised modern art for a generation, never gave up on public sculpture. Early on he was a member of the last generation able ...”

“... Charles. This is important, because the movie is mostly about the way it looks. It’s meant to be a political thriller – based on Robert Harris’s novel The Ghost (the film has that title in the UK) – but it feels as if the writer went home halfway through, taking the story with him, and leaving the director and cinematographer to do what they could ...”

“... January 1779 the British merchant ship Westmorland, en route from Livorno to England, was captured by two French warships off the Spanish coast. France having joined the War of Independence on the side of the Americans, the Westmorland’s captain, Willis Machell, was prepared for trouble. He had a crew of sixty and 22 cannons, but was outgunned. The ship was ...”

“... glorifying Desire (‘the whole creation will appear infinite and holy … This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment’) or insulting Joshua Reynolds (‘This Man was Hired to Depress Art’). A few may have been excited by the promise addressed to Christians at the top of one of the Jerusalem plates: I ...”

“... keen to have us understand that the photographs of Iraqi prisoners being tortured and humiliated by US soldiers did not reflect what America stands and fights for: the values of democracy, freedom and personal dignity. That the case turned into a public scandal was, in some ways, a positive sign: in a truly ‘totalitarian’ regime, it would have been ...”

“... The most enthusiastic moment came when David Cameron promised to end poverty and pronounced the Tories the real party of the poor. The Conservatives have, of course, always thought themselves the real party of the poor but this time the claim was accompanied by some genuine rhetoric about inequality which they may come to regret ...”

“... the fact that people who post pictures of their lunch on social media are generally looked down on by those who don’t. Most of Taylor’s literary examples come from Thackeray, whose Book of Snobs appeared in 1848, and George Orwell – he has written biographies of both. Alan Bennett, who has the finest antennae for social nuance, is absent. So is Muriel ...”

“... things, outside Washington’s vast National Museum of Women in the Arts (five thousand artworks by a thousand artists, from Lavinia Fontana, b. Bologna, 1552, to Cindy Sherman, b. Glen Ridge, NJ, 1954). Murray Edwards isn’t a museum: it’s a women’s college, founded in 1954 – as New Hall – at a time when Cambridge had the lowest proportion of women ...”

“... or from memory – has become a standard part of his story. It was as if every painting had to be a terrible battle with reality. The goal was not greater naturalism, but rather to convey the sense of a dizzying encounter untethered from habit and convention. You can see this in Soutine’s early landscapes, made in the decade or so after he emigrated to ...”

“... from critical acclaim to audience approval to mass adoption more gradual than it used to be. Once, there were immediate hits and misses. There still are – but it’s more common for the hits to build gradually, by word of mouth. Many shows seem magically to become more famous in between series than when they are ...”