“... The life​ and work of Dora Carrington have long been overshadowed by her death. As is often the way with suicides, later viewers find it hard to lose hindsight. For all the vivacity in many of her paintings, which seem to vibrate with joy in colour and form, she is often cast as a tragic figure. A less obvious factor in her relative obscurity is the obsessive cult of Bloomsbury ...”

“... home, which faced the marketplace where his family were traders. I took a picture of my Star of David necklace against this backdrop, possessed by some primal, spiky urge to reinstate an ephemeral Jewish presence in this town which now has no Jewish community. I walked around the old synagogue, which has been converted ...”

“... and was a gateway to Arabia in the last river valley before the desert.Objects unearthed by Franco-Palestinian archaeological teams first arrived at the Institut du monde arabe for an exhibition called Gaza Méditerranéenne in 2000. By the end of that year, the period of relative calm that followed the Oslo Peace ...”

“... In​ 1888, two soon to be famous composers completed their earliest significant works. In Leipzig, where he was employed as second conductor at the Stadttheater, Gustav Mahler put the finishing touches to what would later be known as his Symphony No. 1. These days performed as a four-movement work, it received its premiere in Budapest as a five-movement ‘symphonic poem ...”

“... Professor Sir Peter Strawson is properly honoured by the 12 essays written for this anthology. Unlike the papers in some other collections of this kind, most of these are addressed to issues in which Strawson has a serious interest and on which he has done substantial work. It is therefore delightful to find that Philosophical Subjects also contains Strawson’s replies to each of the essays presented to him ...”

“... long thought someone ought to tackle: a fearless update of New Grub Street. The job wouldn’t be too taxing – indeed, in many cases, it would be all too easy to attach contemporary names to Gissing’s sunken literary types: his principled dullards as well as his sleek chancers. And then there are the grim trappings ...”

“... In my last Diary I remarked that the game of plus ça change can be played, with the help of selective quotation and anecdote, to point almost any moral you choose. But if there is one topic in the sociology of 20th-century Britain on which the conclusion that nothing changes is inescapable, it is trade-unionism. Ever since 1875, when a Conservative administration removed collective action in furtherance of a trade dispute from the law of criminal conspiracy, successive governments have veered between conciliation and confrontation, successive employers have veered between concession and resistance, and successive union leaders have veered between moderation and militancy ...”

“... as grandparents and even great-grandparents. The landscape sloped down to the sea and was designed by White, with fountains and statues, formal hedges, arbours, colonnades, stone benches, rows of potted orange trees and a windmill. White’s origins were comparatively humble, but the families he and his son married into were upper-crust and rich. They had ...”

“... to Virginia Bottomley when invited to a bash for executives of the music business: ‘I refuse to be used merely as photo fodder for the self-publicity of somebody whose party has no understanding of or compassion for the people of this country.’ In an election campaign timidly built on the values of Middle England and the Daily Mail, covert encouragement ...”

“... tenure at the Home Office has coincided both with the growing sloppiness of a Whitehall exhausted by perpetual Tory rule and with the emergence for the first time of a muscular, interventionist judiciary. In such circumstances, whoever was in charge of the Government’s determined effort to wreck the lives of our prisoners, our aspiring immigrants and our ...”

“... It was passed to me some years ago during pre-dinner drinks at the judges’ lodgings in Lincoln by the butler, who had sensed that, though formally in charge, I was not to the manner born. I had the same sense of not quite belonging in the Plymouth lodgings last winter. The lodgings, a terraced dwelling of colossal proportions on the Hoe, was once Nancy ...”

“... No one reads George Meredith any more. His novels are thought to be brainy and obscure, his difficulty is seen as suspect. In the four weeks ending 22 February, according to Nielsen BookScan, 1359 people in Britain bought a copy of Middlemarch; of the noteworthy novels published in the same decade, Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes sold 182 copies; Meredith’s The Egoist sold nine ...”

“... of the past tense is ‘the only case I know in which two great systems of Western thought may be tested and compared . . . like ordinary scientific hypotheses’. As for his own theory of the tense, it is ‘an opening statement in the latest round of a debate on how the mind works that has raged for centuries’ – this book never runs low on hubris ...”

“... When I was asked, in November 1997, whether I would allow my name to be submitted to the Lord Chancellor for appointment as a lay member of the new Special Immigration Appeals Commission, I readily agreed, not only because I was flattered, but because I accepted that special procedures for appeals against deportation in national security cases were justified ...”

“... are as colourful as they are improbable. Picasso liked the mystery, was eager for no one to be sure what he would do next. Told that Joanna Drew, a curator at the Hayward Gallery, had found cocoons huddled in the slits of his Man with a Sheep, Picasso said that at Vauvenargues one day he had felt a wasps’ nest between the sheep’s legs; nothing more ...”