“... somewhat less at ease with texts, Professor Goffen is at her best when, following the example of David Rosand, she discusses the relation of the paintings to their physical context in the Frari, emphasising what it might be convenient to call their ‘intermonumentality’: in other words, the way in which they echo, quote or refer to other images in the ...”

“... out to Southern blacks of his generation, but he suffered insult enough of a more polite kind. It may come as a shock, for a reader conditioned by three decades of agitation and legislation in favour of equal rights for American Negroes, to read of hotels in Boston and San Francisco, as well as Akron, Ohio and Green Bay, Wisconsin, refusing him service ...”

“... it gave for respectable touching (amplified by much mutual rubbing in of embrocation afterwards) may well have been – as Jock Phillips suggests writing of 19th-century New Zealand, but with a sidelong glance at the English public schools – a source of comforting closeness in a society where women were scarce or marginalised and the taboo against ...”

“... to the Church Commissioners, who passed Dr Bennett’s essay for publication, is that they may have been lulled into a sense of false security by the nature of the notably anodyne Preface contributed by Dr David Edwards, the present Provost of Southwark, to the 1983-85 Crockford, the first to appear under the new ...”

“... that marked the end of Brezhnev’s rule: from this, even so independent a mind as Medvedev’s may not have been entirely immune. With a new leader in the Kremlin and political change in the air, he has begun, in the last few months, to speak out again, even though the present climate for dissent could hardly be less congenial. The fact that Medvedev is ...”

“... and promise myself work or love or letters, or fall back on the comfortable reflection that I may soon be dead myself.’ A reluctant but conscientious officer, he went off quite routinely, thanks to a piece of shrapnel in the mouth. In the sealed world of The Children of the Souls the lower orders are neither seen nor heard. Voices from the Spanish Civil ...”

“... work on the 18th century has shown, he writes well. His Thoughts on the Present Discontents may not quite match Burke’s: but they are cleverly marshalled. His many insights are highly informative. His few in comprehensions could hardly be more revealing. Mr Carswell names the Assessors who sat with the Robbins Committee and acted as liaison officers ...”

“... He is right about that. They would also notice some strange inclusions: for example, essays on David Frost, Kenneth Clark, Tom Wolfe and Germaine Greer – Sixties figures to a man. Booker’s earlier book, The Neophiliacs, he tells us, was ‘a detailed, analytical account of the astonishing changes which had come over Britain in the Fifties and ...”

“... expired, he applied for the chair in physics at McGill University in Montreal, hoping ‘that this may make J.J. act in respect of getting me something to do in Cambridge. I will probably go in for a fellowship this year ...’ In fact nothing materialised, and most of Rutherford’s great discoveries were made at Montreal and later Manchester. He returned to ...”

“... jets – and partly to try and build a financial and commercial empire. The turning-point was May 1982, when he was invited onto Radio Four’s Money Box to explain his so-called new wheeze, bond-washing. (Buy a gilt just after it has paid a dividend, when the price is lower, hold it until just before the next dividend is due, when the price is ...”

“... to the Lady Chatterley trial jury about the reading-matter appropriate to wives and servants, he may have had in mind the criteria applied by a Sunday Times editor in 1949 to The Naked and the Dead. ‘No decent man could leave it lying about the house,’ the paper had exclaimed about Norman Mailer’s novel of the Pacific war, ‘or know without shame that ...”

“... whirlwind trip around European thought, with seven and a half pages on Hegel, one and a bit on David Hume and so on. The Monty Python ‘Summarise Proust’ contest, in which competitors had thirty seconds to deliver a précis, springs irresistibly to mind. Like the motion of desire itself, the book drives remorselessly from one author to another, raiding ...”

“... Wheeldon and Kyle Abraham, alongside classic ballets by Kenneth MacMillan and Frederick Ashton. In May and June, ahead of the full reopening, the company streamed an online programme featuring choreographers closely associated with the Royal Ballet. One name was conspicuous by its absence: Liam Scarlett, the former Royal Ballet artist-in-residence. In March ...”

“... against the interlopers by inventing evangelistic exploits for ancient saints like Dyfrig or David. Malcolm Lambert is a judicious guide to the shifting opinions of scholars amid these quicksands, casting a sceptical eye even on Bede’s motives for glorifying and sanitising the Roman mission to the Anglo-Saxons. What makes Lambert’s account so ...”

“... are not the end of the book. We turn the page and read a quotation from the American novelist David Markson: ‘Or was it possibly nothing more than a fundamentally recognisable genre all the while, no matter what Writer averred? Nothing more or less than a read?’ We can take the question as referring both to the described movie and to the describing ...”