“... National Portrait Gallery – are full of transient things: paintings of an ant moving across a rock; images of clouds, of decaying fruit; portraits on film of people who won’t be around much longer, or who have already died. Landscape, her exhibition at the newly expanded Royal Academy (until 12 August), begins with a scene of snow-covered mountains, The ...”

“... the book, might contemplate the debt they owe to those who fought and died for a ‘dispute over a rock with a village population’, to quote the words of one of the dead, Lieutenant David Tinker RN. Perhaps on reflection, and with realistic offers of compensation and, if desired, resettlement, they might accept a ...”

“... the many small groups that filled the square. Movement veterans like the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and Marina Sitrin, the author of a book about horizontal organising methods used in Argentina, conversed with twenty-somethings freshly radicalised by disappointment in the president they helped to elect. Not long after the police massed at the ...”

“... garlic, and John Minton’s seductive, and faintly Post-Impressionist, illustrations to Elizabeth David. Brooke, after the war, heads for the Mediterranean as fast as he possibly can, but, being Brooke, he is already deeply nostalgic for his Army days there and strives to reanimate certain epiphanic moments – with no success whatever. In his largely ...”

“... of fifty or more people including his aunt, a teacher, a policeman, three ‘lovely lassies’, a rock musician, a turfman and his ass, a farmer and his sheep, at least one neighbour, his mother, and possibly his father as well. Most of these murders are caused, directly or indirectly, by Pat’s relationship with his mother, a fiercely possessive woman ...”

“... my mind was elsewhere, sometimes pondering imagery from familiar hymns: wondering where the ‘rock of ages cleft for me’ might be located (perhaps near where ‘Alf the sacred river ran’?) and what the ‘gracious calling’ might sound like, were I to stand ‘beside the Syrian sea’. At the same time, I was gazing at ‘St Georgius’ in shining ...”

“... tarpon, radiated from Jim’s wrists and ankles, ran across grass and Jim’s beautiful Japanese rock garden to the back bumpers of cars poised to travel different directions. I wanted to tell Jim that it would be over quickly, that it wouldn’t hurt. Jim Kunkel is the deposed mayor of a suburban town, and he’s being drawn and quartered by automobile. The ...”

“... another great vita nuova man, ever inclined to exhort himself: ‘Be Samuel Johnson! Be the rock of Gibraltar!’) All the same, despite Svevo’s rule, there have been a few people – Tolstoy, Wittgenstein and D.H. Lawrence come to mind – who not only went on expecting to be transformed, but managed to be so – and this without much reference to ...”

“... to play fifty years ago) were also billed, alongside veterans from the founding festival: Santana, David Crosby, Country Joe McDonald, the remains of the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat and others. But Lang’s fifty-up began to unravel when his top-dog investor, the Japanese digicoms company Dentsu Aegis, announced from its London HQ that it was pulling ...”

“... for example – there’s a kind of aural density, with hip-hop and classical as well as pop, rock, country and right-wing talk shows; the latter two seem to last furthest into the remoteness, and then they fade, and it’s silence or tape. On my way to Highway 50, it was still cool when I ran over a huge snake sunning itself on the asphalt – chipmunks ...”

“... rarer for a critic, whose work tends to date fast. The morbid, sexy idolatry usually reserved for rock stars, dead poets and suicide blondes is being lavished on him. The front cover of Tynan’s Letters, published in 1994, features a portrait taken by David Bailey, itself a sign of pop status. The front cover of The ...”

“... cultural reach’ evidently strained every sinew. It apparently infects the 1947 film of Brighton Rock, based on Graham Greene’s novel of 1938. With the exception of Ida’s Pierrot troupe there is little in the film to suggest any link to Victorian England. But then the ‘structure of feeling’ is a woolly conceit, almost a faith. Proof isn’t ...”

“... equally illuminating in charting their subjects’ partial successes and partial failures. Thus David Hume attacked the 18th-century myth of an ancient British constitution and warned his readers of the disastrous political consequences of ignoring their history. By reminding them of the recent emergence of constitutional government he wished to point to ...”

“... in anything approaching a full way. The Times gave it modest coverage, both through the columns of David Wood and through its reports of debates in the plenary sessions. For all practical purposes, the rest was silence.’ Something resembling silence also greeted the European Elections of 1979. These not only produced the present combative European ...”

“... and pre-Holocaust past. All we needed to do to eradicate it for ever, we thought, was stage more Rock against Racism events. Shakespeare, who did not occupy a cherished place in the hearts of skinheads or NF agitators, didn’t seem central to the issue. If anything, his willingness to write the role of Othello, which despite Burbage’s original blackface ...”