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“... in 1981, Secker and Warburg reissued his Orchid Trilogy as a single volume, with an introduction by Powell, and it is nice to see this trilogy now reprinted as a Penguin Classic. For his work is oddly appealing, and it is worth probing why. The form, as he invented it in his first book, The Military Orchid (1948), and exploited further in A Mine of Serpents ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as much as any thought of scientific ownership. He knew, however, that before such pleasure could be communicated, the species under examination must be given a scientific name. The ritual of identification has rules. For example, no animal or plant has been allowed more than one scientific name since Linnaeus established ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Temple of Apollo’ after Claude Lorrain by William Woollett (1760) Among various unforgettable moments in a life much of which has been spent thinking about landscape in literature and the visual arts was a remark made ten years ago by Kirsty Wark in the programme which follows Newsnight on Fridays, in which she was chairing a discussion of the Gainsborough exhibition then at Tate Britain ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cards in order to gain access through these checkpoints. Locations of the checkpoints are still to be determined. The notice quickly spread beyond the university. For months Occupy organisers had been planning three days of ‘Education, Celebration and Resistance’ to honour the movement’s first birthday. The events would culminate in mass civil ...”

“... and facial features poking out through the sand that wonder and amazement were sometimes preceded by horror and fear, when their discoverers thought they had stumbled across a newly deposited corpse in a dumping ground for mafia murderers. Just such a newly emergent masterpiece fills the first room, the central rotunda of the Royal Academy: the larger than ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was the only proper solution; or, at the least, a largely elected one – some room could perhaps be legitimately provided for a few retired politicians, the rationale being that even though they might not do much good in the Upper House their elevation would benefit the lower one. But to make the whole House of Lords a retirement home for placemen and ...”

“... of sentimental song collected in Emerald Gems; and his mother, before her suicide, became obsessed by a record of ‘The Butcher Boy’. The songs are a recurring motif in the novel and tie together all the real and imagined rejections Francie has suffered at the hands of his family, of his friends, of society as a whole. Rebuffed yet again after trying to win ...”

“... winter. It knows nothing but two seasons: Dust, and Mud. Now, at this moment, in May, we seem to be getting towards the end of Mud. Mud settled in more than six months ago, and has shown no sign of taking its leave just yet. The streets have settled into their pristine ooze, and if there be any bedrock beneath the vast ...”

“... outside the English-speaking world, took a more flexible view of the range of forces that might be involved in Earth history; but there is no doubt that Lyell’s denial of catastrophes was influential. By the middle of the 20th century, most experts viewed meteorite impacts and global extinctions as the province of ...”