“... Could​ anything be more unexpected, in the world of art criticism, than the appearance of a book by Rosalind Krauss on Willem de Kooning? Krauss is a wide-ranging critic and historian of modernism, the author of an influential book on Picasso, but she has been associated above all with minimalist and post-minimalist sculptors of her own generation or slightly older – figures such as Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra – and then with the promotion, through the journal October, which she co-founded in 1976, of a somewhat younger group of postmodern artists who substituted photographic imagery for painting, among them James Coleman, Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman ...”

“... Room, for example, as versions of each other. But the matched books do make interesting sense: more thoughtful sense, perhaps, than the already powerful separate stories. The Fire Next Time consists of a brief, hortatory letter to a young nephew about being a black American, and an eloquent memoir/meditation on the same subject, which includes an account ...”

“... Collins, A Biography came out in 1974) and now, preeminently, to William Clarke, we now know much more – especially about Collins’s family affairs, or scandals, as they would have seemed to his contemporaries. As its title suggests, The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins is sensational stuff, both in the Victorian and modern senses of ‘sensation’. But what ...”

“... locates the Dickensian ambivalence about death in Dickens the man. Stewart’s critical method is more ambitious and fashionably trusts the text rather than the tale or the teller. His main proposition runs thus: as a form, the novel is dedicated to knowledge, to talking, to communication; when it confronts that whereof it cannot know – namely, death ...”

“... his desk: ‘Reading Rots the Mind.’ A young theoretician friend of ours stated his reasons more explicitly: ‘I don’t see why I should read the bloody nonsense other people write when I can read my own papers.’ I find that young scientists tend to read too little, especially in subjects that are peripheral to their own narrow problem. Medawar ...”

“... so different from the gallant Southern generals who led their own troops in person. There is more than a whiff here of that traditional antithesis (of which every age since Homer seems to throw up a variant instance) between the gentlemanly valour of skilled personal fighting and the mean upstart butchery of the missile weapon, or whatever new refinement ...”

“... youths were qualified to paint in fresco, and the Oxford pictures decayed and disappeared even more rapidly than the ones at Westminster, which required extensive repairs as early as 1868. Despite these calamities, the Victorians were bent on adopting the Arthurian ideal as the supreme guide to conduct. Courtesy, gentleness, honour, physical ...”

“... pleasure – and this has allowed him an insider’s appreciation of some of the subtler or more material effects of art. And, as a writer, he has evolved a distinctive style – though, so naturally does his prose read, it seems odd to talk of evolution – which enables him to convey with great precision the results of the eager, exploratory way he ...”

“... there don’t seem to be many modern writers who care about the book, or have been marked by it. Thomas Mann wrote a wonderful essay about it, but its moral world seems very far from his own. Faulkner said he used to read Don Quixote once a year, but you wouldn’t guess this from his writing. The influence of Don Quixote on Latin American fiction has been ...”

“... because Oswald is obsessively riding the New York subway when we first hear it. ‘There’s more to it,’ David Ferrie says in the same novel. ‘There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.’ Surface and secret: even when people ...”

“... Bear Stearns in March, and took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in early September; as I write, more massive infusions of taxpayers’ money into the financial system are on the way.) The coincidence of the megasuccessful auction in London with the metafinancial disaster in New York is striking, and it makes a couple of things clear. First, while the ...”

“... by the maths master. In less than fifteen years, Vaughan – who had been a favourite pupil of Thomas Arnold at Rugby – transformed the school, spiritually, sanitarily and commercially. He raised money for a fashionable chapel by George Gilbert Scott as well as new boarding houses, decently appointed and, from the mid-1850s, complete with water ...”

“... would rise, year on year until 2035, to 43. An individual’s contributions also became marginally more expensive. Again, there were protests and stoppages, but battle-weariness had set in. Macron’s project, presented in January, reawakened the public’s resolve to fight it out. In addition to raising the retirement age by two years, the phased-in ...”

“... United States Coal and Coke Company established a mining camp named after the company president, Thomas Lynch, just north of the Cumberland Gap in eastern Kentucky, at the foot of Black Mountain, the highest peak in the state. By the start of the Second World War, more than ten thousand people were living in Lynch, and the ...”

“... are bodies in history. The history of the body always concerns someone who seems obviously both more embodied and more historical than you, like a medieval ascetic, or Emily Ratajkowski. But the fact that your own ordinary body is a product of history becomes unforgettable during birth. You are reminded that, were it not ...”