“... called the ‘Cahiers’, maybe at their own expense. ‘Why do the friends do this? It can only be that they believe, in some real way, the friend’s life and work belongs to them … It speaks for them because they shared a place in time.’She begins her present book, which ‘may or may not be a biography of Kathy ...”

“... Auden remarked that to read pornography in any other way than as a sexual stimulus is to be bored to tears. Crime fiction is similar: you read it for the story, and literary pretensions are unwelcome. The right style is spare, understated. You don’t want philosophy, psychology, political reflections, purple passages or digressions on the Battle of Waterloo ...”

“... increasingly aware of its multiracial character: a chapter of history of which all Britons can be proud. As Christopher Brown’s excellent recent book on the abolition movement suggests, Britain, the world’s leading slave trader in the 18th century, later presented abolition as irrefutable proof of its virtuous motives as it embarked on a new era of ...”

“... for Sherlock Holmes’s or Hercule Poirot’s ingenious but ultimately arbitrary explanation to be exposed as just another false trail. One of the many pleasing things about Jedediah Berry’s first novel is that the plot hinges on a famous detective’s most celebrated cases having been solved incorrectly. The hero of The Manual of Detection is Charles ...”

“... snarling at the comfortable or the insufficiently harrowed reader: Laura had imagined herself to be in love with Nathan … Truly in love. A dizzy, silly, confusing, confounding love … Love. Secret and hairy and cinnamon-flavoured. A hot sharp-shooting sherbert love. A mishy-mushy, hishy-hushy, splishy-sploshy kind of love. But the love had been ...”

“... dissipated and extravagant: ‘Is not the course which you steer in life, almost entirely directed by fashion and pleasure?’ Civilisation and modern woman were born together. In Britain, their conceptual histories were entwined from the moment, sometime in the mid-18th century, when enlightened theorists came up with the idea of a cumulative stage of human ...”

“... Painting, the exhibition held in 1981 at the Royal Academy. It’s fitting, then, that this should be the venue for the first full retrospective in Britain, curated by Kathleen Soriano (until 14 December). Kiefer has always divided critics, some taking fright at his heavy Germanic imagery, others describing the experience of ...”

“... a failure of statecraft on a scale unmatched since Lord North lost the American colonies, David Cameron has managed to convert a problem of party management into a constitutional crisis. The result of the EU referendum raises serious constitutional issues which haven’t been properly confronted. The media are now comfortably immersed in the political ...”

“... so simple and seemingly arbitrary, there is probably more truth in it than there ought to be. The Swede Tomas Tranströmer was for our time the poet of the North, the pendant – to use the obvious parallel – to Ingmar Bergman, in one of whose early films he was an extra, as a boy. Like Bergman, he gives you the days that are all night, and the ...”

“... opposite of the rules for, say, peer-reviewed journal articles: ‘Nastiness and dickery will not be tolerated’ and ‘Fun will be had.’ TV Tropes defines a ‘Mind Screw’ as something that has departed ‘so extremely’ from any ‘attempt at regular old coherency, that the immediate response afterwards is “what ...”

“... 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 Montafon Letter, 12 feet high and 24 feet wide, done in chalk on nine blackboards ...”

“... Early theorists of humour considered it a form of speech rather than writing. And speech could be extremely dangerous, as the Bible warned: ‘Death and life are in the power of the tongue’ (Proverbs); ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity’ (James). Elsewhere in scripture the tongue is compared to a razor, a sword, a bow, an arrow – words were ...”

“... that its shape fills the frame and swallows up the pitch-dark ground. This is Lucretia, depicted by Artemisia Gentileschi at the moment before she kills herself following her violation by Tarquin: not the uncertain-looking, girlish Lucretia portrayed by Artemisia’s colleague Simon ...”

“... the road, shaved their heads, changed their names, and aimed to avoid ‘testosterone poisoning’ by cutting out men almost entirely (they hoped they might one day convert enough lesbians to create a vast Van Dyke population). Levy’s interest in these figures seems more than journalistic: she meets Lamar Van Dyke, the last remaining member of the group, and ...”

“... but it didn’t cut the numbers coming in. And May’s driving purpose was to cut numbers, after David Cameron had recklessly pledged to bring net annual migration down to the ‘tens of thousands’ from nearly a quarter of a million. Family migration was not the only target – May also capped work permits and student numbers – but the language test was ...”