“... themselves, and all these variables may be controlled for effect. There can be art in this, and Michael Fried argues that within Western painting there is a special tradition of realism, stemming at least from Caravaggio (who, he reminds us, painted a Medusa). In such pictures it is not that a shocking effect is due to reality being let in through pictorial ...”

“... was travelling around Europe between 1936 and 1938, for part of that time with the itinerant Joseph Roth. He died in exile of the effects of alcohol in 1939, and Keun returned to Germany, a formerly bestselling but now blacklisted writer, to live incognito throughout the war. The novel consists of Kully, her writer father, who is forever somewhere else ...”

“... was accompanied by a widespread fascination with ‘Gypsies’ in popular culture. Klaus-Michael Bogdal, a professor of German literature at the University of Bielefeld at the time of the riots, was struck by the contradiction. In the early 1990s, Germans were taking up flamenco lessons. The French-Gitano band Gipsy Kings was hitting the top of the ...”

“... shortage of actual instances of articulate unbelief. This intriguing paradox lies at the heart of Michael Hunter’s book, which combines lightly revised versions of his previously published essays with newly written chapters to advance a distinctive argument about the significance of atheism in England and Scotland before the Enlightenment. Building on his ...”

“... time, another traveller, The Jewish Rider (1985/86), is deep in a book. He looks remarkably like Michael Podro, but it may be a disguise or a trick of the light – one can’t be sure. Down the corridor we can see the conductor – dressed like a bell-hop in an old comedy – brandishing a riding-crop. Out of the carriage window, crucifix and death camp ...”

“... cannot understand why he is so sad but the film all too insistently offers a complete explanation. Joseph Fiennes as Bassanio shows us why the Christians in this play are, on the whole, such an unlikeable lot. Lynn Collins as Portia looks as good as she ought to, and redeems some tiresome moments in the early scenes by being startlingly good and grave in the ...”

“... trusting neither his knowledge nor the scruples of dealers and other intermediaries (he described Joseph Duveen as a ‘serpent charming a bird’). Velázquez’s Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, on Horseback was bought for him by his mother. Huntington imposed on himself a rule to buy only outside Spain – ‘to Spain I do not go as a ...”

“... the author of The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (1987), Ilan Pappé, Yossi Amitai, Uri Bar-Joseph, Michael Cohen and Uri Milstein. In 1948 and After Morris wrote of his generation of Israeli historians: ‘Most of them, born around 1948, have matured in a more open, doubting and self-critical Israel than the ...”

“... and the detective, just as there seems to be none recorded between Holmes’s prototype, Dr Joseph Bell, and his pupils in Edinburgh – or, indeed, between that Ur-Holmes, Voltaire’s Zadig, and the authorities of Babylon in the mystery of the sacred horse of the king and the queen’s respectable dog. Clues, then, if they are to be fair, must fall ...”

“... for his long-standing support of left-wing policies in relation to the EEC and to disarmament, Michael Foot owes his recent election as leader mainly to the fact that he is loved, admired and trusted as an unswerving democrat by colleagues from end to end of the Parliamentary Party; and he certainly sees his role as that of conciliator in the party’s ...”

“... European country). An account of Stevens must be sensual, or it is nothing.I love a quatrain from Joseph Brodsky’s poem ‘Plato Elaborated’: ‘There would be a café in that city with a quite/decent blancmange, where, if I should ask why/we need the twentieth century, when we already/have the nineteenth, my colleague would stare fixedly at his fork or ...”

“... of Mann, ‘the humour of which he was so proud is faint.’ Prater is discussing the four Joseph novels (1933, 1934, 1936, 1943), but as far as I know English-speaking readers have not found Buddenbrooks (1901) or The Magic Mountain (1924) too rollicking either. In his preface to the new Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, Ritchie Robertson says the ...”

“... Few eyes could be seen to ‘light up at the sight of her’ on a Thursday morning, as Keith Joseph said his did – ‘while she’s hitting me about the head’, he added. She never relied on Cabinets again. (Then and since, she has suffered more defeats in Cabinet than any of her post-war predecessors.) By the autumn of 1981, she was also trailing ...”

“... scale until the Second World War: four volumes (and still unfinished) for Salisbury, three for Joseph Chamberlain (likewise incomplete) and for Curzon, and a double-decker apiece for Asquith, Balfour, Campbell-Bannerman and Rosebery. The second half of our century has seen a dramatic decline in the construction of these many-volumed vaults. In the United ...”

“... contrast to Rousseau, whose ideas can often seem too true to be Swiss). The other, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès from Provence, is not mistrusted outside his native France so much as ignored. Even in France he is more of an intellectual curiosity than an object of reverence. The French Republic has had too many constitutions, too many false gods and too many ...”