“... about how to use Milner in our daily lives: Emilia Halton-Hernandez’s The Marion Milner Method, David Russell’s Marion Milner: On Creativity and Akshi Singh’s In Defence of Leisure, forthcoming this spring, which is described as a book about ‘experiments in living with Marion Milner’. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of these books ...”

“... administered the pledge to some penitents who were actually ‘in a state of intoxication’ and may well have been, as Samuel suggests, experiencing the fleeting regret of the very drunk rather than a lasting desire for reform. In Birmingham in 1863, a priest implored his flock to put in requests for sick calls before 10 a.m., ‘except in very urgent cases ...”

“... households – households containing more than one pair of parents and their children – may exist for only a few years altogether in a society where the complex household is a norm. But as that book showed, the family life of Western Europe has been determined by what has come to be called the ‘Hajnal’ pattern of marriage. Marriage, J. Hajnal ...”

“... be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours lacking this obscene quantum of liquidity might well complain about the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the damage to their foundations. It doesn’t signify. And ...”

“... planning for the early summer has been postponed indefinitely by the onset of Covid-19. The virus may have changed the game, but not the preoccupations of environmentalists. To many, it presages the difficulties that climate change has in store for us; it will bring us to our senses, they hope, and force us into a massive salvage operation that protects our ...”

“... for all to see. It seems likely that very early on certain newspaper execs – and Rusbridger may have been one of them – made a guess: soon enough, the paper part of newspapers would disappear altogether, and the money saved from having to print and distribute paper news would compensate for money lost from cover price. Like commercial TV ...”

“... succeeded thanks to his own vandalism and Forster’s loyal destructions and suppressions. We may speculate, but we will never know the inner Dickens which those burned papers would have revealed. The biographer must remain for ever fenced-off. Kaplan’s is an academic’s view of things. For him and his university-based colleagues biographies, like ...”

“... municipal catering with youthful experience of school stodge and custard – outdated as that may now be – and remain loyal to the fast-food they know and love. In Socialism in a Cold Climate one may survey broadly the same battlefield but from a higher vantage-point. This, too, is a collection of essays on the ...”

“... relatively minor aunt sallies of whom not all readers will have heard, such as a certain Professor David Harlan. But behind these front men lurk the high-priestly figures, whom Elton hints will prove no less evanescent: Foucault, Barthes and M. Jacques Derrida, who is expected to share Sir Geoffrey’s company when honorary degrees are conferred in Cambridge ...”

“... below); the equestrian portrait of Niccolò da Tolentino in the Duomo; and the windswept David, painted on a leather shield now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In a lost Assumption of the Virgin, it is said, he portrayed himself as Judas. There is no doubting Andrea’s impact among his contemporaries: a challenging figure with a ...”

“... its outline distinct or was it so brilliant that outline could not be perceived. In other words I may say did it look like the moon definite in form or like a large bright fire at a distance quite indefinite except as a centre of light? Did it distinctly cut ducks & drakes on the surface of the lake? Were its bounds perceived & traced by the eye? Were any ...”

“... critical works like this ‘will ever make much contribution to the common wisdom’. ‘We may have here an avant-garde that will never be joined by the main army – happy enough behind the lines and content with its familiar rations.’ Kermode is writing these words in 1980, and reflecting not only on Tanner but more generally on the ‘new ...”

“... coupling of Foucault’s study with the canonical texts of the so-called anti-psychiatry movement may have been fortuitous but it was to prove lasting. Folie et déraison appeared in an abridged translation in 1967 in a series on existentialism and phenomenology edited by R.D. Laing, complete with a eulogistic preface by ...”

“... multimedia work provocative enough to entice the public back to contemporary art galleries they may have visited many times already.Richter somehow manages to do both. On the one hand, he uses an oversized squeegee to make huge colourful abstracts that can sell for £20 million each; on the other, he is the creator of austere constructions in ...”

“... for our adventures with others, a provisional set of assumptions that can be modified, but which may be resistant to modification, about what someone else is likely to say or do. We are surprised, sometimes, when our imagined idea of another person’s character is overturned by the reality of their behaviour – and novels and dramas and even epics often ...”