“... only God can know the truth about the truth, most people assume that what we don’t know could be known by somebody looking hard and skilfully enough at the problem. I’m not sure if in the 21st century there is quantitively more in the world that isn’t known, but certainly we know that there is more we don’t ...”

“... Vampires seem to be making a comeback these days, and not just at night and from the grave. In broad daylight you see sleek sets of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels everywhere, and the first of no doubt many movies based on the series opened at the end of last year.* But vampires haven’t really been away. From Dracula to Buffy they have sustained an extraordinary attendance record among human communities, have never stopped being almost everyone’s favourite form of the undead ...”

“... Museum (until 25 July). First, paper was expensive and vellum more so. The drawings tend to be small and nothing is wasted – variations or new subjects are often found on the other side of the sheet or in unoccupied corners. Second, painters kept hold of drawings so that an unfamiliar thing, a cheetah say, or a difficult one, such as a gesturing ...”

“... Once​ upon a time there was a place called Europe. All the paintings there were by Klimt and all the music by Mahler. No, there were also special Richard Strauss evenings, and the cafés played Johann Strauss waltzes all the time. Everyone was analysed by Freud, but it didn’t make any difference ...”

“... counterpart. After all the adulation given to Richter in recent years, there was bound to be a swing in the direction of Polke; this impressive show is that swing. If Rauschenberg and Johns prepared the way for Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, Polke and Richter quickly adapted American Pop, which they first encountered in magazines, to German ...”

“... to shoplifting pork and beef: ‘College was supposed to straighten me/like a bent tree strangled by a wire,/but being done with sweetness I could not resist the lure of meat.’ She had a special line in bad or stinky sex: a teen defloration felt like ‘trying to cram a washrag/down a bottle neck … In the end the inside of me/was not wiped ...”

“... Wilder concentrate on the delirium, which he definitely wasn’t going to let go. It wouldn’t be a screwball comedy if it didn’t depend on loose screws, on faith and fragile logic rather than reliable engineering. Even the date, about twenty years too late to keep company with the classics of the genre, is off. There is another premise, another genre in ...”

“... Excitement was aroused by the announcement, last September, of a double discovery: the actual rules, on a cuneiform tablet, of a board game thought to date from 3300 BC, of which only some surviving boards had previously been known, and a living individual from a Jewish community in Cochin who had herself played that very game before she migrated to Israel, and could recall the rules in accordance with which she had then played it ...”

“... When you draw up a list of famous frogs in the history of the planet, it turns out to be pretty short. There’s the one who was only doing time as a frog, and there’s the one who was nothing more than a small felt glove puppet who went into show-business and hobnobbed with a lot of celebrities in the Seventies ...”

“... revolutions, it is also about the past. There is a half-remembered sense of a past which has to be restored: a more glorious time which must have preceded the arrival of the occupying invaders, a past when the people had their own sovereignty, their own dignity, their own freedom to make mistakes. The very name ‘Sandinista’, from Augusto Sandino who in ...”

“... Knowing something of Argentina gives one no privileged insight, on 18 April 1982, into what should be done; it does give one a stronger desire to avoid a war, and a different awareness of some of the issues. Whatever happens to ships or governments, countries do not sink. In his Britain and Argentina in the 19th Century, published in 1960, Professor H ...”

“... when we are being shifted from him to her. The result is a blurred hagiography: Ingrid Bergman, to be sure, but softly flattering, the hard outlines left to the imagination. A pity, because Miss Bergman wants something from her readers. ‘lt could never happen today,’ she says in effect, referring to the world-shattering scandal of 1948, when she bolted ...”

“... that he tells us is that it was originally written in German, that it was translated into English by Daphne Hardy, an English sculptress who was living with Koestler at the time, that she invented its English title, that it enjoyed a great success in France when it was translated soon after the war as Le Zéro et l’Infini, and that it was dramatised in 1951 ...”

“... enduring and improbable stereotype of the journalist-as-hero). Writers, directors and actors may be forgiven for misrepresenting the minutiae of the life of a journalist: they may not, after all, be lucky enough to observe the proprietor, the editor and the reporter, from life. But the one area of which they do have some ...”

“... pictures appeared showing bruises and grazes on Tymoshenko’s skin, caused, Tymoshenko said, by a beating at the hands of prison staff, Merkel raised the stakes. In a speech to the Bundestag, she bracketed Ukraine with Belarus as a European country where ‘people are still suffering under dictatorship and repression’. She still hasn’t decided ...”