“... people’s ears off and punchin’ refs, that only tells me one fing: ‘e doesn’t want to be in the ring.’ Precisely. Cooper’s other good remark, about the desperately low quality of opponents for Audley Harrison, the boxer whom the BBC has paid one million pounds: ‘they keep on diggin’ up dead bodies for ‘im to knock dahn.’ 30 May. First ...”

“... Ensconced in British Somaliland, he and his dervishes were the subject of repeated air attacks by an RAF unit. As A.W.B. Simpson writes in one of the early chapters of this sprawling, monumental and sometimes magnificent book, Z Unit was responsible for bombing ‘Medishi Jidali, where there was a fort, and for machine-gun attacks on the unfortunate sheep ...”

“... herself as a French Surrealist icon and a British war correspondent, her name could sometimes be confused with Lee Friedlander’s, even though he was a very different artist with a long-term, stable fame. Lee Miller’s fame kept growing, but it was unstable, even too fragmented to outlive her. Right now her name is largely unrecognised, except ...”

“... Last April, the Icelandic government published a report on the country’s image written by a committee of its leading businessmen. It summarises Iceland’s history thus: ‘For a long time, the nation lived through hardships, but once it achieved freedom and independence it leaped in less than a century from being a developing country to being one of the richest nations in the world ...”

“... there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected.’ Words like these are rarely spoken in public in Washington, and anyone who does use them is almost certain not to get a high-level government position. But Admiral Dennis Blair, the new director of national intelligence, greatly admires ...”

“... Hollywood he is no longer a genius but a prophet. His relationship with reality is then likely to be beyond talking about, and unlike the successful novelist, say, or the smart young painter, a director (owing to his relationship with millions of dollars and a prideful notion of the masses) will often disappear in a miasma of tasteless lunacy. There have been ...”

“... end, but peters out in a shoulder-shrugging way, as if to say: ‘You thought this was going to be a joke?’ I’ll spare you the details of the one about what is green, hangs on the wall, and plays the violin. These jokes are not funny, just mildly desperate. Except that of course desperation is funny too, if you tell it right. The Coen Brothers’ new ...”

“... peril: it tends to make their characters pretty angry. Made to suffer cancer, Christie Malry warns B.S. Johnson that he will look stupid when they discover a cure, and anyway, ‘you shouldn’t be bloody writing novels about it, you should be out there bloody doing something about ...”

“... look like a skyscraper, but it’s more than a hundred metres high. You come out at the top by pulling up over a ridge of bricks and scaffolding onto an expanse of grey slate, big as an empty town square, between two of the great white chimneys.Giles Gilbert Scott believed in thoroughgoing industrial beauty. We found as we explored that the insides of ...”

“... Instead, they are victims of chokeholds, bullets and other ‘restraining’ measures inflicted by the police, and not only below the Mason-Dixon line. Police killings of young black men, along with the mass incarceration of poor blacks in US prisons, have become the symbol of a national disgrace that is no more hidden than the concealed weapons that far ...”

“... Among​ the many fascinating questions raised by Abstract Expressionism, on show at the Royal Academy until 2 January, is this: if I renounce depiction, refuse representation and fully embrace abstraction what the hell am I going to paint? The show gives the answers arrived at by 24 painters, not all of them American but all of whom worked in the United States between 1930 (Jackson Pollock’s haunted self-portrait) and 1979 (Joan Mitchell’s joyful Salut Tom, which pulsates with fluid light ...”

“... The giant Norwegian fir that stands there every year – given annually since 1947 – must be the tallest Christmas tree in London, and the oldest: fifty years, compared to the ten weeks it takes to grow the living room sort. It’s not the prettiest, though, its only decoration is a cascade of lights that hang in vertical strips, almost erasing the ...”

“... fun​ of watching Donald Trump humiliate and eliminate his Republican rivals has now been ruined by his victory over Hillary Clinton on 8 November. The polls had it that he would only be able to wreck one party. Now he has wrecked both of them. The upshot is that Clinton will never have the chance to invade Syria or ...”

“... main London dealer and worked with both Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. Brausen asked the young David Sylvester to write something for the catalogue. His response remains acute: Richier, he declared, asks ‘not only how much damage the human body can endure and still remain human, but also how far the human body can ...”

“... a while we are forced to grapple with questions like these. We are forever asking for our MPs to be human; but when we are confronted by their humanity, their spiky, quirky, sulky particularity, it quickly becomes painful for us. Who are these people? we demand. Who let them in? Where have they been hiding?They’re not ...”