“... paintings between August 1948 and December 1949, some great ones among them, such as the all-black Abraham (his beloved father died in June 1947). They were bigger and flatter, with less atmospheric space and less inflected colour. But when he showed a selection of paintings at Parsons in January 1950, he got mixed reviews and only one work sold (to a ...”

“... alive in Israeli air strikes; of women and children subsisting on 245 calories a day. This is what Benjamin Netanyahu describes as ‘the victory of Judaeo-Christian civilisation against barbarism’.The military operation in Gaza has altered the shape, perhaps even the meaning, of the struggle over Palestine – it seems misleading, and even offensive, to ...”

“... American Andes played their melancholy flutes and on the pavements of New York, Paris and Rome black peddlers from West Africa sold trinkets to the natives as the natives’ ancestors had done on their trading voyages to the Dark Continent.’ Or when upper and middle-class youth start to take on the clothes, music and language of the urban poor. Strangely ...”

“... sounds like Gilbert and Sullivan in the metrically exuberant, sexually discreet translation of Benjamin Bickley Rogers. But the under-presence of the ancient freedom is everywhere, for those with ears to hear. The charge of not-quite-perfectly-concealed, intense homoerotic emotion in Housman’s scoutmasterish ‘love of comrades’ is a good example. It ...”

“... were pledged to obstruct the war effort. Among other things, they used to go about in the black-out attaching ‘sticky back’ notices to lamp-posts, telephone kiosks and so on. The notices informed passers-by that the war was a Jews’ war. Parties of illicit bill-stickers would emerge in pairs from Anna Wolkoff’s flat, all of them thoroughly au ...”

“... Prey do Beckmesser in an otherwise dreary Meistersinger at the Met. Rather than the neurotic, black-suited Shylock figure regularly trundled out, someone who barks more often than he sings, Prey’s Beckmesser was a pouty, vaguely adolescent, and extremely vulnerable middle-aged man, his insecure learning as a shield for his sexual uncertainties. But the ...”

“... made fixed festivals. But few other holidays entered the calendar to make up for the many red and black-letter days (major and minor feasts respectively) that had been stripped from the old year. The week, by contrast, dominated and ordered life. Calvin had rejected the idea that Christians were obliged to rest on the Sabbath. In New England, by ...”

“... room of the club, Stephen said, pointing with two fingers at a table across from us: ‘There’s Benjamin Britten.’ Against the light from the window, I saw a man with dense curly grey hair talking with someone at his table. Stephen kept looking toward him, but Britten never looked our way. As we were leaving the club, Stephen said, having, it ...”

“... and immaterialised – by its surroundings.) Once upon​ a time, in the good old days of Walter Benjamin, I thought of writing a book called Paul Cézanne, A Portrait Painter in the Era of High Positivism. Its question would have been: How do human beings offer themselves to ‘portrayal’ in a culture where they understand themselves, and expect others to ...”

“... of the USS Ranger. He had argued with senior officers in Boston, but in France found an ally in Benjamin Franklin, the American commissioner in Paris, and a womaniser unfazed by Jones’s own sexual profligacy. In April 1778, Jones sailed the Ranger from Brest, intending to harry British ships on the Atlantic coast. Two weeks later he seized and burned ...”

“... l’Homme to be returned to Algeria; he also commissioned another investigation, by the historian Benjamin Stora, into disputes (intra-French and bilateral) over the late colonial period in Algeria and France’s undeclared war against the independence movement.Most of Macron’s interventions concede a point of principle in parts of the world where, in ...”

“... the university’s pre-eminent academic college. Under a series of progressive masters, including Benjamin Jowett, Balliol adopted aspects of the new, relatively meritocratic and non-denominational culture of professionalism that was reshaping Victorian British elites, and encouraged many of its best students to take public exams in the recently established ...”

“... the conflicts of the present. The anti-racist movements of the last decade, culminating with Black Lives Matter, have focused on raising awareness of colonial history, including the importance of slavery, empire and settler colonialism in the development of European capitalism. Thanks to this, it is no longer surprising to hear the origins of National ...”

“... Four: no longer buttoned up inside matching suits, but individually tailored in tasteful shades of black, brown, beige and grey, hair midway between moptop and Maharishi, out in the open air pretending to play and – maybe with a little help from a sneaky lunchtime joint – enjoying the pose. They only had to open their mouths to reveal their ...”

“... in which the malarial mosquitoes breed. For many years I have treasured a quotation from Walter Benjamin which may have helped spawn the character of Arnow or, more likely, contributed something further to a figure already compounded of many memories and unconscious sources: ‘The slightest carelessness in the digging of a ditch or the buttressing of a ...”