“... 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 ...”

“... debut and Harold Bloom hailed the arrival of a great original. ‘I think I speak for many,’ David Kalstone wrote, ‘in saying it appeared with that sense of completeness of utterance and identity that must have come with the first books of Wallace Stevens (Harmonium) and Elizabeth Bishop (North and South).’ The book they were talking about was ...”

“... If​ Britain votes to leave the EU it will take several years to disentangle what’s to be kept and what discarded from our EU-saturated legislation. The law of the European Union has left few areas of life in the UK wholly untouched even though the EU can only legislate in areas for which it derives what are known as ‘competences’ from the treaties member states have ratified ...”

“... is destroyed’, he told an audience in 1882, ‘capital will not flow, enterprise cannot be created, wages must fall, and commerce must stagnate’. It was a neat formulation, deployed to dent the case for radical reforms that would, in the Tory worldview, destabilise the polity by setting ‘class against ...”

“... this frantic exercise in ‘resilience planning’, my mind drifted back to a time still unblessed by the wisdom of Dominic Raab, the former Brexit secretary, who shortly before the end of his tenure admitted how little he had appreciated the country’s reliance on transportation by the Dover-Calais route. A simpler ...”

“... The​ city of Minneapolis, in which George Floyd lived and died, has been plagued not only by Covid-19 but also by an epidemic of police violence. As Mike Griffin, a community organiser, put it, he was ‘just as likely to die from a cop as from Covid’. Major news outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post, seemed astonished at the scale of structural and environmental racism exposed by the pandemic ...”

“... Almost five years ago the Cape Town publishing company David Philip brought out Way Up Way Out, a novel by Harold Strachan. Some time later I was sent a copy of the book by a friend of Strachan’s in KwaZulu-Natal, where the author himself has lived much of his life ...”

“... their fantasy of frontier settlement and biblical prophecy was being played out, and they will be blind to the fact that they will now be living amid the ruins of the homes of their former neighbours. The Jewish settlers who lived illegally in Gaza will be handsomely compensated (an ...”

“... to expose the secrets of Whitehall while the story was still hot, they were strongly aroused by the sight of naked acts of power, and thrilled to bits by their own part in the proceedings. With the diaries of Leopold Stennett Amery we return to the politics of an era whose revelations are chiefly of interest to ...”

“... this ‘such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say: it cannot be right these actions should go any further’. Royal Commissions, ad hoc inquiries into a defined issue, were not in fashion at the time. The last one had been held fourteen years earlier. But the Conservative home secretary, Kenneth Baker, announced on the day ...”

“... compounds harmaline and dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Their textiles and ceramics are characterised by kené, geometric patterns that represent the life energy of the ayahuasca plants, which are absorbed by those who drink the brew. Kené means simply ‘design’, but the patterns themselves are far from simple, with thick ...”

“... delegations have met more than a dozen times, though it’s hard to point to anything that would be different had they not. Over the months the talks have taken a predictable form. Negotiators are convened. Unnamed officials say that, this time, they are optimistic about a deal – right up until the proceedings break down. The US has presented a succession ...”

“... a historian called Elliot Weiner as he searches for a cache of love letters supposedly written by ‘the shallowest president in history’. Along the way he gives us the backstory of Harding’s improbable political career, seduces the granddaughter of Harding’s now 80-year-old mistress and shares a nifty hack for making hollandaise in a blender. The ...”

“... Yet many marine species that once teemed in their millions have been harried close to extinction by nets, longlines and harpoons. The scale of the loss is mind-boggling. For every three hundred green turtles that swam the Caribbean before industrialised fishing, just one is left. Ninety per cent of the world’s large fish and oyster beds have gone. Seagrass ...”

“... David Attenborough​ was born in 1926, the same year as Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro and Elizabeth II. He began hosting Zoo Quest on BBC television in 1954; not quite seventy years later, his latest series, Wild Isles, has just finished airing (it’s still available on iPlayer, or Amazon Prime for those outside the UK ...”