“... parakeets, which are spreading rapidly in London (a large colony at Sunbury apparently) and may one day oust the pigeons. Yorkshire, 29 March. The conductor on the GNER train to Leeds is now styled Customer Operations Leader and announces himself as such, though (and it’s to his credit) he stumbles several times when he has to broadcast this ...”

“... a certain lapse of time will be necessary before the execution of this clause, until the public may, I do not say understand, but admit this painting. Twenty years or so might be required; in the meantime, my brother Martial, or failing him another of my heirs, will keep them.Caillebotte’s provision for an exhibition of his fellow Impressionists was ...”

“... planning for the early summer has been postponed indefinitely by the onset of Covid-19. The virus may have changed the game, but not the preoccupations of environmentalists. To many, it presages the difficulties that climate change has in store for us; it will bring us to our senses, they hope, and force us into a massive salvage operation that protects our ...”

“... and the fate of the Jews. But the lessons I draw from them, the ways I see them combined, may not – by the end – be those most obviously expected. Because of Dreyfus, therefore Israel. It is an argument that many find unanswerable: the crimes perpetrated by the French state against the Jewish officer heralded, for those who could hear, the end of ...”

“... to Marseille to teach. Sartre proposed to her so that they wouldn’t have to be separated. ‘I may say that not for one moment was I tempted to fall in with his suggestions,’ Beauvoir writes in The Prime of Life, adding that ‘the task of preserving my independence was not particularly onerous; I would have regarded it as highly artificial to equate ...”

“... that she was resting and practising her elocution with a view to a theatrical career. There may also have been a miscarriage or an abortion. With no private income, Lopokova had to keep on dancing for her supper or look to men for security. Lovers were played off against one another. She dumped her nice American fiancé, the journalist Heywood Broun, in ...”

“... Russia Modernise?, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (2013) and Richard Sakwa’s Putin Redux (2014). New Year’s Eve 1999 – when Yeltsin appeared on Russian TV screens to announce his resignation as president in favour of Putin – is often taken to mark a major turning point, from the ‘fevered 1990s’ to the stability ...”

“... where of them’? Was she not manifestly a writer ‘for whom places loom large’? The problem may have been that place in itself does not loom large in the novels and stories. Bowen’s North Cork is not a mythical terrain like Hardy’s Wessex. What matters, rather, is a relation of person to place – created as much in expectation and memory as in ...”

“... a pillow’. Kauffman, whose large classical scenes are evidence of her mastery of the human form, may have studied statuary, plaster casts, other artists’ drawings or, as later rumour had it, an obliging male model, Charles Cranmer – who claimed that he visited her house to sit, with her father present, chastely ‘expos[ing] his arms, shoulders and ...”

“... or messengers. Ellison’s dream was of a different kind. His friends included the black novelist Richard Wright and critics like Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman; his heroes were Joyce and Eliot; he studied The Golden Bough for the mythical themes he hoped would make his novel immortal. Ellison aspired mightily and he dressed the part as he imagined ...”

“... which are followed by advice for curing sick cows. The anonymous compiler of this manuscript may have come home from a hard day at the cockpit to read how Homer’s fighting cocks kept themselves at the peak of fitness by eating ‘flesh of high hornd beeues, and drinking cups full crownd’, or about other mysterious Homeric dishes which always seem to ...”

“... in Meaux, where he was probably bullied, and where the older boys led a mini-insurrection in May 1968 – no doubt adding to his growing horror of leftist radicalism. But he made friends: plenty of Demonpion’s interviewees, from all periods of his life, report that although unusual and sometimes difficult, Houellebecq is also funny and charming. He ...”

“... lay the groundwork for the Lib Dems’ decision to form a coalition government with the Tories in May 2010. Laws, who became chief secretary to the Treasury, wrote that, without The Orange Book, ‘it is much more difficult to imagine’ the coalition ‘being formed and sustained’. Marshall became an enthusiastic supporter of austerity: he called for even ...”

“... that came before him. And BBC managers are unsackable. In the recent judgment on the Cliff Richard case, besides criticising the rationale behind broadcasting the story in the first place (which, typically enough, was in part to avoid criticism for not broadcasting it), the judge found that the UK news editor was not a reliable witness and that the ...”

“... Dennis Potter’s sexually provocative and formally challenging Singing Detective (1986) and Richard Eyre’s film of Charles Wood’s anti-Falklands Tumbledown (1988). When a newly aggressive ITV, freed from its franchise limitations by the 1990 Act, decided to make popular drama its flagship audience puller, BBC drama was faced with an unprecedented ...”