“... 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 ...”

“... collected around the census year of 1841 and gave female life expectancy as 42 and male as 40. By the sixth table, in 1891, life expectancy for women in England and Wales was 48 and for men 44. Many people lived longer than this, but so many babies died in their first year of life that it brought the average down. Public health reforms during the 1890s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In​ the spring of 1972, the poet Bernadette Mayer began to keep a journal for her analyst, David Rubinfine, whose patients included Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, and who was notorious for having married another patient, Elaine May, a decade earlier. Mayer was 27. In the journal – there were two, in fact; Rubinfine read one while she wrote in the other – she attempted to record her states of consciousness ...”

“... Parks’s protest shots, Robert Frank’s The Americans, Diane Arbus’s weirdos), wouldn’t be worth the film it was shot on – but it was different for Roy DeCarava. Hallway (1953) is a photo about nothing except a dark, empty corridor in a Harlem tenement: a quiet image that speaks to what it was like to inhabit these forgotten spaces, to ...”

“... Early in the war, the British government realised that the key to the country’s survival would be its ability to secure supplies of food and raw materials, for much of which it would not be able to pay. The answer could only lie in assistance from the United States. Roll was one of a number of British economists who ...”

“... avoids self-pity. But self-satisfaction and self-righteousness were certainly not purged by keeping the journal. His intelligence and sensitivity often distanced him from the art of the past which was the ostensible object of his desire, but in recompense elevated him comfortably above all but a handful of his fellow men. It is hard to suppose that ...”

“... The festschrift, a collection of essays in honour of a senior professor, used to be dismissed as a rather tiresome German habit. Now, I think, it has become embedded in English academic procedure. A festschrift is a gratifying compilation to receive and sets an interesting task for the contributor. But it is the most difficult type of book to review ...”

“... rebel author has never learnt the art of diplomacy and at times has been as bitterly criticised by his erstwhile Communist friends as by members of the government which denied him a passport. His physical toughness was developed in his youth, when he worked on a sheep farm in the bush for £1 a week. At the same time, he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Amsterdam. Unless we decide to replace them with 945 different measures (the 35 would have to be agreed with each of the 27 member states), the current agreements will have to be renegotiated with the EU itself. Otherwise they will lapse, and the EAW will go with them. Operational agreements with non-EU Norway have ...”

“... 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 ...”