“... Acres, a transposition of King Lear to contemporary Iowa. Larry Cook is an ageing farmer who, by dint of hard work, canny management and lack of aversion to profiting from the misfortunes of others, has built up his farm to 1000 acres. ‘The seemingly stationary fields are always flowing toward one farmer and away from another. The lesson my father might ...”

“... enduring. Consider, therefore, what can happen to writing when the beloved reader is supplanted by ‘a dark-suited, bald-headed censor, with his pursed lips and his red pen and his irritability and his censoriousness – the censor, in fact, as parodic version of the figure-of-the-father’. If the imagined reader makes the writing possible, the censor’s ...”

“... young men in their prime, which had been commissioned and presumably in outline designed by one of them (Dinteville, on the left), and remained in his family for the next 150 years.North’s interpretation of The Ambassadors starts from the implied presence in it of Henry VIII’s astronomer, Nicolaus Kratzer, a Bavarian. Holbein had done a portrait ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Daniel Farson was polite, self-deprecating, impressed by modesty and authenticity, grateful for favours, careful to keep track when it was his turn to buy drinks (which he often did). Gilbert and George, by contrast, are utterly stylised: they speak in relays, move like robots and strongly hint that there is no within within ...”

“... more tricky? Well, there is the long history of self-advertisement, which has sometimes seemed to be one of its special characteristics, and the equally long history of hostility and denigration; picking your way between the two is probably not the ideal method of getting hold of the real and substantial thing. No problem, nowadays, concerning the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... campaign contained policies which they claimed would counter the ‘demographic problem’ posed by the Palestinian presence in Israel. Ariel Sharon proposed the pull-out from Gaza as the best solution to it; the leaders of the Labour Party endorsed the wall because they believed it was the best way of limiting the number of Palestinians inside ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... before, against his will, because his mother could no longer look after him. Having been persuaded by some friends that he was being taken out in a sedan chair to visit another acquaintance, he was conveyed instead to a cell in the asylum, a sepulchrous building abutting the old city wall. On discovering the ruse, a contemporary biographer wrote, Fergusson ...”

“... at Lingfield in Surrey. The services meant very little to me, though my curiosity was awakened by the preference in some sections of the congregation for the crisp and definitive ‘Eh-men’ instead of the attenuated intonation of ‘Ah-men’. I was also curious as to what it was that made the spotty boys and girls in the choir giggle. And I worried that ...”

“... unstable relationship with race.The show opens with two large flags hanging from the ceiling. David Hammons’s African American Flag (1990) hangs behind Chris Ofili’s Black British version; both recast symbols of empire and the nation-state in the colours of Pan-Africanism: red, black and green. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois wrote ...”

“... like the gallery, is devoted to Art Brut, a movement that insists on the value of art made by self-taught artists, including patients in psychiatric hospitals. I visited the exhibition by accident, wandering in during a weekend in Paris, and found pictures of tree roots made up of twisted and tortured bodies; of Adam ...”