“... who made £200,000 by restoring and faking antiquities for Grand Tourists in Rome, running a black market in smuggled silk stockings and turning out portrait busts for vain celebrities, was a sordid skinflint. Henry Cavendish, who discovered hydrogen, died a miser, a recluse and a millionaire. John Courtoy, a fashionable London hairdresser, never had a ...”

“... His translator George Szirtes has written of ‘the slow lava flow of narrative … the vast black river of type’, which beautifully describes the physical experience of reading Krasznahorkai’s work, the need to slow down in order to find its rhythm, the feeling that the narrative is oozing outward rather than converging on a neat conclusion. ‘It ...”

“... elements in this painting were conditioned by its setting. The church interior is illustrated in black and white to show how the arched vault in the altarpiece echoes that of the chapel in which it is placed and how the pilasters of the painting’s stone frame echo those which mark the entrance to the chapel itself. The lighting on the saints in the ...”

“... do the kind of natural history that is now dignified as science. Witherby himself, the patrician Max Nicholson recalls in his Introduction to this final volume of the BWP, had a ‘track record of serious ornithological exploration’. Stanley Cramp, by contrast, who retired early from Customs and Excise in the Sixties and an active life in the London ...”

“... the incision, the red wound and hand, so harsh and sudden against the swooning white thigh and the black coats.’ Composition, colour and pictorial focus converge effortlessly in this passage, which makes a single portion of the vast canvas come vividly alive. Sometimes, however, the surface is a little too smooth, the rhetoric too slick, the verbiage too ...”

“... the Edinburgh skyline and blocked views of Arthur’s Seat. More recently, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, there were demands for the removal of Hume’s name from the building. This was because of a racist footnote Hume added in 1753 to his essay ‘Of National Characters’, first published in 1748. The footnote begins: ‘I am ...”

“... to burnish his culture wars résumé. Also disgraceful was the disenfranchisement of Florida’s black electorate on his watch. Florida election officials, ostensibly looking to prevent felons from casting ballots, worked from lists riddled with errors and mistaken entries, with the result that more than 12,000 qualified ...”

“... Crawford, in full colour, has bouffant hair, a big smile and expensive teeth. Johnson, in grainy black and white, wears a black leather jacket, with a pipe jutting rigidly from between his lips and a stare that seems to ask the eternal pub question: ‘What are you looking at?’ In a comment under the article, a ...”

“... supposed geniuses seem like dullards. How could Einstein not immediately grasp the reality of black holes, which I understand so well? It’s a wonder he could hold down that job in the patent office when he doesn’t even know about wormholes. If these really are stories rather than essays, Labatut needs to make his people come alive, as Guy Davenport ...”

“... were, they ran the risk of going too far in the other direction. ‘As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure,’ Wald argued, ‘and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note.’ His book came close to suggesting Johnson wasn’t much ...”

“... hardly know what may happen in real life and fear it accordingly. On the night of the New York black-out in 1965 someone I know was with his analyst. As the lights went out the analyst – not the patient – jumped out of his chair and shouted: ‘They’re coming to get me.’ Psychoanalysts have had good reasons for considering themselves ...”

“... them to the chair’. Clark noted that Beardsley’s work showed Munch ‘how simplified areas of black and white can work on the emotions’ and that Picasso, who had seen Beardsley’s prints in the Barcelona art journal Joventut, ‘made good use of Beardsley’s pure outlines’. I half-expected him to go on and make the obvious connection with ...”

“... task force, or cast and crew – to work together to get the job done.The example offered is Black Hawk Down (2001), a blockbuster based on a book by Mark Bowden about the near disastrous military operation that culminated in the hasty retreat of US forces from the centre of Mogadishu. Thomson tells us that he has felt compelled to watch the movie over ...”

“... A photograph taken that morning shows Phillips sitting in a canoe, speaking to a local man in a black cap and camouflage cargo trousers who is holding a child in a green shirt. Phillips is recording the conversation on his phone. Minutes later some of the villagers watched as he and Pereira cast off in a narrow aluminium boat with a 40-horsepower ...”

“... likeness between the two brothers was now registered as a kind of mocking joke, a cruelty of fate. Max Beerbohm, meeting Willie around 1893, reported that ‘he is very vulgar and unwashed and inferior, but if I shut my eyes I can imagine his voice to be the voice of Oscar. Who was it that said, “Scratch Oscar and you will find Willie”? It is a very ...”