“... 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 ...”

“... convincing motive’, ‘try to surprise the reader at the end, but always play fair’ – could be a list of everything that was deliberately missing from Moshfegh’s previous books, which are populated by flat, chronically miserable characters who repeat the same self-defeating and often viscerally revolting actions ...”

“... the bonxie swipes. They nest on open ground; stray too close, and the bonxie will drive you away by flying straight at your head. (Once, on North Rona, my friend Stuart and I were walking along when a bonxie took exception to us. It came in fast, misjudged its height and walloped Stuart so hard it burst his eardrum.)I could see the Bass on the horizon on the ...”

“... Breton to explore a variety of practices in multiple locales. This ambitious show, co-curated by Matthew Gale of Tate Modern and Stephanie D’Alessandro of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where it appeared last autumn), is filled to the brim with paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, films and documents from an extraordinary array of ...”

“... as columnists speculate about whether he will run for a second term in 2024, at the age of 81, or be replaced by a pundit’s dream ticket of Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg. The spectre of Trump remains, at least in the obsessive minds of those who believe the vandalism done to the Capitol on 6 January was a catastrophe ...”

“... voices and then subsuming them all under the breezy heading of ‘new writing’. Diversity has to be on show, because we all know that diversity is good for literary culture, but at the same time nobody must step so far out of line that the sense of community is spoiled. Any areas of contrast between the individual contributions are counterbalanced ...”

“... that cliché awards them; but then one of the suggestions of this film is that clichés have to be worked with, that there is no way round them, and (at present) no place beyond. The time is the summer of 1977, the year of the Queen’s Jubilee, but the real celebration is here, every Saturday night: a festival of plurality. The film has two later echoes of ...”

“... at the Crown Hotel, Everleigh, where he had been staying for five days at a house party hosted by J.M. Keynes. The cause of Rupert’s distress was the departure that day of Noel Olivier, to go climbing in Switzerland. Her elder sister Brynhild had left with her, off to climb in Wales with Hugh Popham, to whom she had just become engaged. Moping in his ...”

“... his folly (and must underwrite much of its cost)’. It is precisely that conflict that ought to be visible in the Odyssey, the poem not of war, but of the aftermath of war. Yet, despite the Odyssey’s ‘primitive vestiges’, despite the ‘repressed material, old and interesting’, that comes ‘struggling out’, the women are not given the voice to ...”

“... Shop.’ Most County grounds have an establishment like this, where anything that can reasonably be sold at a profit – papers, sweets, magazines, cricket shirts, canned drinks, books – is stocked. Mrs Eaton’s shop, a Portakabin located at the back of the terracing in the forecourt to the ground, has all this and more. In one corner is her coffee ...”