“... In​ David Hare’s play The Absence of War, the Kinnock-like party leader, George Jones, is a tragic figure. His wit, his passion and his ability to extemporise are gradually extinguished, with his connivance, by a party machine that spends its time trying to out-Tory the Tories ...”

“... her tunic’ – but she evidently doesn’t reciprocate. They’re young: ‘He wouldn’t be one of those boys who turned up at a girl’s house unannounced.’ He’s tall: when he stands up after putting her suitcase down, he ‘knocked his head against the bald light bulb’. He has recently arrived in England; the fittings and fixtures in the flat ...”

“... biologist at the University of Minnesota, passionately defends what turns out – weirdly – to be perhaps the most hated bird in America. I knew that ease of identification wasn’t everyone’s criterion for affection, but I hadn’t realised the depth of loathing the bird inspires, or considered the federal policies that facilitate its destruction. Linda ...”

“... every jerk and jolt, and the law of the sea, from the literature I loved most, seemed nowhere to be found. And so, this past summer, when I boarded a fast boat to Capri – that famous rock where Lenin and Adorno hiked, and where now those who can afford prices set for Russian oligarchs shop – I was not immune to the prospect that the good-looking captain ...”

“... in 2014, constitutes a public health emergency of international concern.’ The statement by Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organisation, on 1 February was very precise. It wasn’t about the spread of Zika virus itself, but about the possible complications of an infection caused by it. The ...”

“... pleasures are on offer when Caravaggio paints a glass vase in the National Gallery’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard or a basket of fruit in Supper at Emmaus (the latter, painted in 1601, has been hung next to The Taking of Christ from 1602.) This, after all, was the young Lombard’s calling card when Roman patrons led ...”

“... of Muskau (nearly 200 square miles in size, annexed to Saxony in 1806 but allotted to Prussia by the Congress of Vienna and partly absorbed by Poland in the 20th century), together with the smaller estate of Branitz. He was determined not only to carry out improvements but to create a landscape park on the English ...”

“... The comedy business​ in China used to be dominated by male entertainers from the north of the country. In the radio and television era, the most popular forms were xiangsheng (two-handers) and xiaopin (sketches). For xiangsheng, performers wear the traditional cheongsam, hold a fan in one hand and stand in front of a small table: the dou gen, or lead, tells the story and throws out punchlines, while the peng gen, his foil, takes the role of the ignorant spectator ...”

“... There are​ two portraits Roger Fenton took of himself, separated by only a year, one of them in the exhibition of his photographs of the Crimean War at the Queen’s Gallery in Edinburgh (until 26 November) and the other not. The first, from 1854, seems conventional: we see a Victorian gentleman – hair parted, beard trimmed to cover only the underside of his face, leaving the strong chin to fight its own battles – seated in a chair, his arm resting on a covered table ...”

“... project as a neighbourly fence that made the most of its unattractive character, often by pretending it had nothing to do with exclusion. The fence, the New York Times said, could be reconceived as ‘a horizon of opportunity, not as a barrier’. The ‘glass forest’ border designed ...”

“... refers to as the ‘ubiquitous cigarette’ (recte, the inevitable cigarette: it may always be there, but it knows its place) looks shrunken to a bidi. ‘Quappi in Grey’ (1948) I take Beckmann to be one of the great painters of the 20th century, his life one of the great 20th-century artists’ lives, and his ...”

“... thirty years later could only happen in America too.Justices to the Supreme Court are nominated by the president and appointed, in accordance with Article II of the constitution, after the ‘advice and consent of the Senate’. When Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland for the seat, but the Senate declined to ...”

“... On 19 June, a day after the opening, an eight-metre-high banner titled People’s Justice, painted by the Indonesian art collective Taring Padi, was hung from a scaffold in Friedrichsplatz, Kassel’s central square. It was a massive piece of agitprop, a cartoon-like version of a Diego Rivera mural, depicting perpetrators and victims of the Suharto ...”

“... England: Wiltshire (1963), Nikolaus Pevsner wrote with barely contained anger thatWiltshire would be as wonderful as it must have been in Hardy’s, in Hudson’s and in Jefferies’s days, if the army, and more recently the air force, had not got hold of it. As it is, the army is up in Salisbury Plain with towns of barracks and genteel soldiers’ housing ...”

“... the large ships travelling to Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Domingue; work began on what was to be the magnificent Place de la Bourse on the Garonne and on the new merchant houses and shops for the luxury trades. Slave ships stopped at the port en route to West Africa: Bordeaux was one of the major anchorages along the French coast. Nantes dominated the ...”