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“... A woman threw her glass of wine at me,’ James Lasdun’s second novel begins. At a party held by a wealthy philanthropist in New York, a woman walks up to the narrator and asks: ‘Excuse me, are you Stefan Vogel?’ He says yes; she flings her wine in his face. In keeping with the novel’s mood of dreamlike self-absorption, the event is replayed many times ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an Uzbek taxi driver, exiled from his own country and caught up in a revolution (which seems to be in Egypt, though the local detail is deliberately non-specific and at times contradictory). But he also wants to tell us how he got hold of the story, how he’s constructing it, and why that’s a good idea. The action is set last year: ‘As you will ...”

“... led to its publication as a three-volume novel in October 1862, under the name M.E. Braddon. By December, Lady Audley’s Secret had gone through eight editions, and Braddon’s tale of false identities, desertion, detection, bigamy, blackmail, arson, madness and murder had brought her celebrity and become the template for a genre. ...”

“... of plot and causality, which we could see going several different ways if we wanted to. The pieces by contrast are precise bits of visual and aural engineering, not a frame or sound out of place, even if we can’t be sure what their place is. Carruth is said to be working on a third ...”

“... if anyone had harassed the creature, well, they’d have been the one flensed. I happened to be passing through Oban en route to Mull so I joined the small group assembled behind the pizza parlour and public toilets on the pier. Fishing boats were tied up, and across the bay the island of Kerrera lay in the first spring sunshine. The whale had chosen a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which Leonardo was working on at the same time as the Anghiari mural, and some flakes of what may be red lacquer. This harvest of particles is microscopic but substantial – in the sense that these are substances rather than theories and conjectures. Renaissance artists had their own jealously guarded recipes for paints and glazes – Leonardo was famously ...”

“... After the attacks of 11 September 2001, Cheney assembled a crack team of White House lawyers, David Addington, Timothy Flanigan and Alberto Gonzales, with support from John Yoo at the Justice Department, who set about granting the president as many extraordinary powers as Cheney thought he needed. First up was intercepting, without a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... found himself ‘dreaming of the idea of somehow creating a living place where works of art could be enjoyed, inherent to the domestic setting, where young people could be at home unhampered by the greater austerity of the museum or public art gallery, and where an informality might ...”