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“... the 1950s, inspired by a catalogue of prints made by the paradoxical Dutch artist M.C. Escher, the young Penrose and his psychiatrist-geneticist father, Lionel, set out to produce drawings of ‘impossible objects’. Pictorial conventions cue us to perceive two-dimensional drawings as representations of three-dimensional things, but these conventions can also ...”

“... we knew her much better than we really did. John Lehmann, writing of his early meetings with the young Stephen Spender, described Spender as ‘the most rapidly self-revealing person I had ever met’. Something of the sort might be said about Stevie: but one was simultaneously aware of a great deal that was not revealed, and never would be. The public ...”

“... of women by men, men by women, mothers by sons, sons by fathers, infants by adults, young by old, old by young. The death throes of the valley of Atuona were awful. It was and is today a place of extraordinary beauty, the sort of wild beauty that Gauguin ached to find. The peak of Temetiu dominates it. The ...”

“... of Buchenwald, because the society from which they came had been a perfect preparation for it.’ Stephen Vizinczey – another Hungarian, another survivor, though at a younger age, of both Nazism and Communism – has a system more formidable than either in his sights, a system which never for one moment supposes that men can be improved. It is a system for ...”

“... The Horizon survey, in fact, serves as a model for this new investigation. In 1946, George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Herbert Read and Julian Maclaren-Ross each testified that he could manage on £1000 a year net. V.S. Pritchett needed a bit more. Elizabeth Bowen raised a few eyebrows at the time by confessing that ‘I would like to have £3500 a year ...”

“... explanation, and the powers that be will prefer it to the truth, even though they know better.’ Stephen King’s new novel, 11.22.63, combines a variety of genres, being a JFK assassination thriller, a story of time travel, a variation on the grail quest, a novel of voyeurism, a love story, a historical novel, a counterfactual historical novel, and the ...”

“... the Chandos, with its fetching gold earring, probably isn’t a picture of Shakespeare at all. As Stephen Orgel points out in his excellent new collection of essays, Imagining Shakespeare, the sitter for the Chandos portrait has unambiguously black hair, while the Janssen bust, commissioned and supervised by Shakespeare’s surviving family and ...”

“... 16 years as an émigré, and returned to Berlin only to clash with the East German apparatchiks. Stephen Parker’s superb biography of a great iconoclastic writer is impressively sourced, rich in detail, well-paced, highly readable yet serious. His Brecht was chastened by the dark times, but remained what his friend and stage designer Caspar Neher called ...”

“... that they had been made unlawfully because the historic purpose of the university was to educate young men. And so it went on. When Parliament gave women the right to stand for election, Lady Sandhurst was unseated from the London County Council by an opponent who claimed that, not being a person, she could not be ‘a fit person of full age’. But when a ...”

“... which makes them a blunt and often ineffective tool. What seems more comprehensible to young people is the notion of respect. Some interesting work has been done on this in Hampshire schools. The county’s RRR project – rights, respect, responsibility – has produced not only some inspired responses from schoolchildren (‘The most important ...”

“... country by Clinton’s attempt to draw a veil of secrecy over his unconsummated fumblings with a young woman who was not his wife. In the end, overkill underperformed. The impeachment ship went to pieces, flags flying, on the obstinate reef of public opinion. The country did not swallow, for instance, the Republicans’ outlandish claim that a President who ...”

“... Burundi. On the way, I’m stopped at numerous Hutu roadblocks. The barriers are manned mostly by young people with clubs, hammers or machetes. At one, a small boy is holding a nail-studded cudgel with tufts of bloody hair. The smell of putrefying bodies by the roadside is sickening. The starter of my dilapidated car is defective and the militiamen lay down ...”

“... more exciting and purposeful, more serious and more gleeful, in Czechoslovakia when Smiricky was young. About a quarter of this long novel consists of reminiscences thrust in, apparently at random, to interrupt the Canada-based narrative. Smiricky’s memory is jogged by old letters from the friends of his youth, moving about the world, more urgently alive ...”

“... wonder of our stage!’ His climactic description was elaborated in the Second Folio (1632) by the young John Milton: ‘Thou, in our wonder and astonishment/Hast built thyself a lasting monument.’ Historically, Shakespeare criticism begins with wonder, and that it should have returned there in these millennial times ought not to surprise us. This batch of ...”

“... although by no means a foul rag-and-bone shop, is a place for dreams to start. In The Commitment young Jimmy Rabbitte decides that Ireland is ready for soul music and gets his group together. Just as there seems to be a chance with a recording company they desert him one by one. In The Snapper Sharon Rabbitte, drunk in the car park at the Soccer Club ...”