“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Before he began to eat, the book was No. 66 on Amazon. Fire and Fury wasn’t yet on sale. By the end of lunch it was No. 1. The next day you could get copies in London. Not that long afterwards, it was No. 1 in Germany. Resentment broke out, as if Wolff, who has written mostly about the media in the past, had stolen a subject from the seasoned ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 2022 Rwanda did not accept a single asylum claim from nationals of Yemen, Afghanistan or Syria. By contrast, the UK accepted 40 per cent of asylum claims by Yemenis, 74 per cent by Afghans and 98 per cent by Syrians. Other evidence showed that asylum ...”

“... model. The other day, out of curiosity, I stepped inside and let the door thud behind me. It must be fifteen years, at least, since I last experienced that smell of stale urine and old takeaways. For a moment, the phone box became a Tardis and I was a homesick student ringing my parents, harassed by the pips that demanded ...”

“... Britain most of us take comfort from the thought that, though individually we are required to be competitive and self-regarding, nevertheless somehow and somewhere our collective organic self is being caring and altruistic on our behalf. Such an institution clearly deserves study in its own right, as a complex of the things that history is all ...”

“... There​ can be no doubt about the scale of Jonathan Sumption’s achievement in his history of the Hundred Years War. Five massive volumes, published between 1990 and this year, each more than six hundred pages of narrative and notes. Together, they total nearly four thousand pages, not counting the bibliographies, with their ever expanding lists of secondary contributions as well as primary sources in Latin, French, Middle English, Dutch, Catalan and Portuguese ...”

“... is deserved; those interested in the subject – nowadays it is hard to guess how many that would be – are almost bound to be intrigued by the book. When ‘putting down’ means trouncing or violently refuting, the book is safe, principally because one experiences no wish to do either ...”

“... Aged 17, he had proved a new result in modal logic – the logic of necessity and possibility – by building a mathematical model of ‘possible worlds’. He went on to transform philosophy, reviving dormant metaphysical questions. What makes us the particular people we are? Does science tell us how the world must be, not ...”

“... German occupation demolished their home city. She did a PhD in religious philosophy at Harvard; by her mid-twenties she was teaching at Columbia. She looked like Ava Gardner, and lived between Paris and New York, taking lovers in addition to her magnetic, accomplished and somewhat brutish husband, the philosopher and religious scholar Jacob Taubes.When she ...”

“... Academy of Arts in London, Angelica Kauffman (until 30 June) is the first solo show of her work to be held at her home institution. Kauffman’s neoclassical history paintings have long been unfashionable, and her images of mourning women, heads bowed over urns or red-rimmed eyes flung heavenwards, seem sentimental and melodramatic to modern tastes. Her ...”

“... The number​ of Trump administration officials who could be called ‘very competent’ is small, but the former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger is one of them. At private school and university in Massachusetts he learned to speak excellent Mandarin, and in the early 2000s worked as the Wall Street Journal’s correspondent in China (where he was once punched in the face in a café by someone he described as a ‘government goon ...”

“... he died. All had been lifted from Fincham’s ‘twopenny library’ on Colchester’s North Hill by my grandmother. Her modus operandi was simple. A regular and trusted customer, she’d take the latest romance to the counter to be stamped (later she’d inscribe her mark on the back endpaper – she didn’t want ...”

“... from 1968, she writes: ‘This year, I started off thinking of making films that were meant to be shown in a hundred years’ time: i.e. taking different city views, hoping that most of the buildings in them would be demolished by the time the film was released; shooting an ordinary ...”