“... too intent on their own deadlines to discuss their common quarry with him. All this activity may puzzle the lay person. Holden’s final pages report Olivier alive, as well as can be expected at 81, residing tranquilly in the Sussex countryside, still swimming occasional lengths of his pool in the altogether and attending the first nights of the three ...”

“... David Kunzle’s monumental book, fusing deep historical scholarship with polemical zeal and pictorial acumen, has appeared at an apt historical moment. Several weeks ago I looked up from studying some of its illustrations, and my eye fell on the front-page photograph in that day’s International Herald Tribune. The picture seemed to have slid straight out of Kunzle’s book, from somewhere between Soldiers Threatening a Peasant by Pieter Codde (1599-1678) and Soldiers and Hostages by Willem Duyster (1599-1635 ...”

“... his writing because his life was so full of confinement? His earliest surviving letter, written in May 1796 when he was 21, is addressed to an important friend and contains some surprising information: ‘Coleridge, I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through at Bristol, – my life has been somewhat diversified of late. The 6 weeks that finished ...”

“... my head up high and say that now it is sorted’.The Infected Blood Inquiry, announced by Theresa May in 2017, began proceedings the following year. It has now heard oral evidence from more than two hundred people, with many thousands of pages of documents and written submissions, from family members as well as victims. Gary, Colin, Joe and Bob were all born ...”

“... doesn’t help that the IPs we get to hear about are usually the celebrities: Elton John and David Furnish; Annie Leibovitz; Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Surrogacy is one of those subjects on which ‘colour-blind – white – feminism’ tends not to mince words. ‘A human-rights violation’, the journalist Julie Bindel called it in 2018 when the ...”

“... portrait, albeit of a distinctively colonial character and quality. Last year, the art historian David Bindman, who has studied the picture closely for thirty years, proposed that it is in fact a self-portrait, painted by Williams himself.What is the intent of the image and what is created by its beholders? The problem of Francis Williams’s portrait shows ...”

“... by the end of the decade rare ‘class’ was being shown by such public-school amateurs as Peter May and David Sheppard. In 1949, such was the craze for sport, 90,000 people turned up to watch the FA Amateur Cup Final. As Anthony Bailey, who watched Portsmouth when they won the League Championship two years running, fondly ...”

“... real features of the living world. Some of the best recent work on this topic has been done by David Queller and Joan Strassmann, of Washington University in St Louis, in their studies of insects and of stranger beasts, such as tiny amoebas which join to form crawling colonies. Queller and Strassmann classify systems using two dimensions, co-operation and ...”

“... your Prospero.Marsyas was flayed for not knowing his place. Harrison has been luckier: school may not have accommodated his talent (‘He possesses something of the poetical imagination,’ his final report said, ‘but suffers from the waywardness of that gift’), but he put it to use, eventually making his way from Leeds to Broadway.He was helped by ...”

“... fierce because Descartes was at bottom aware that one can’t rule out the possibility that matter may be conscious. Many of the false naturalists, by contrast, have no such doubts. Some of them will deny this. They will insist that they do admit the existence of consciousness or experience, and do allow that it can be physical. But they do this by changing ...”

“... about anything, asking questions like ‘what was the First World War all about?’, but this may have been a game. He was the first member of his family to go to college. Normally, in the words of a neighbour, ‘you graduated from high school and you went to the mill.’ Warhol went to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh to study art. He ...”

“... secrecy is that any government which reveals how its predecessors spied upon their own populace may also face some embarrassing queries as to what comparable actions it is getting up to itself today. It is, at first sight, odd that we know a great deal more about the more necessarily secret world of military and foreign intelligence. The reasons for this ...”

“... Porter’s poem begins by acknowledging separation, remorse, confusion and affection: In wet May, in the months of change, In a country you wouldn’t visit, strange Dreams pursue me in my sleep, Black creatures of the upper deep – Though you are five months dead, I see You in guilt’s iconography, Dear Wife, lost beast, beleaguered child As the poem ...”

“... Fleming’s history is Volume II in the Penguin History of Britain, for which the general editor, David Cannadine, ‘laid down three inviolable rules’: no footnotes, no historiography (that is, no discussion of the ebb and flow of historical opinion), and make it accessible to everyone, general readers, students and professional historians alike (in other ...”

“... of the last half-century’. She certainly had at least two illegitimate children, and Caroline may have been another. It’s possible that her father was the playwright and politician Thomas Brinsley Sheridan. Such parentage would be far more in accordance with Caroline’s character and behaviour than that of her official father. Douglass finds the ...”