“... that Bermejo was himself a ‘New Christian’ and that hostility from ‘Old Christians’ may have been one of the reasons for his frequent displacements. The 1468 contract for Saint Michael, only discovered in the 1960s, reveals that Bermejo had been a citizen of Valencia since the early 1460s. The city was the largest port in the western ...”

“... Legacy: Van Dyck to Cézanne (until 10 April). Equally, he thought about the ways the human frame may veer into deformation (Sedition as hag) or rise into personhood. Coming at things this way, Rubens is hardly a portraitist in the sense his pupil Van Dyck is. Whereas you feel the latter is reacting to some grande dame’s jitters, Rubens homes in on what he ...”

“... fuse in his passage on swifts, for example, which ‘come back each year, in the last week of May’ to his old home somewhere in the south country – a fact which interested me, because I have recorded their arrival since the 1950s in Aberdeen on 11 May and in Cumbria on 6 May. His ...”

“... one kind of ordinary human or another. ‘He never doubted the man you would grow into,’ Aunt May says, reinforcing the point. A little later she delivers the film’s best-known line: ‘You’re not Superman, you know.’ Indeed he’s not, but he’s closer to being Superman than Aunt May can possibly think; a ...”

“... was a poet who liked jokes. That’s not unusual in itself, but she also wrote on topics that may disgust you, or ones that you may think funny poetry ordinarily has no right to address: disease, decay, physical humiliation and several kinds of disability, among them her own. In 1988 she learned that she had multiple ...”

“... in 1881, Pierre Lachèze in 1900 and Jim Jones in 1967. The end of the great plague of 2020 may be in sight, but doomsday predictions come thick and fast these days. The ‘sixth mass extinction event’, the election of Donald Trump, the Mayan calendar cataclysm of 2012, the ‘clash of civilisations’, the millennium bug, all looked – or look, to ...”

“... my teenage son – and I too have tweeted an image that links me to Hannah Arendt. In Aberdeen in May 1974, Arendt had her picture taken along with her great friend Mary McCarthy less than a mile away from where I would have been sitting at that very moment in school. What on earth were those two doing in Scotland? Well, Arendt had been delivering the second ...”

“... into the alliums, so many of them that the poor plants are bowed under their weight. 30 April-1 May. To Essential Music in Great Chapel Street to record The Uncommon Reader, which Gordon House, former head of drama at BBC Radio, has adapted and is producing. What other readers are like I’ve no idea, but I always feel I am a sound editor’s ...”

“... a drawing of myself (‘Cheers!’). The temporarily denominated pub is called the Crossed Pipes.4 May. A review by Elaine Showalter of a biography of the photographer Richard Avedon in which I am mentioned as one of his sitters. Sitting it was too, and in acute discomfort, as Avedon chose to pose me perched on the branch of a tree in Hyde Park, one leg on ...”

“... and French painting (meaning the line from Corot to Matisse, from Sardanapalus to Ma Jolie) may be seen as events of equal weight. Both, taken as a whole – the simple fact of them, their coming into being, their import, their purpose – are mysteries. Both speak to a fundamental change in the conditions of representation in the cultures that gave ...”

“... the staff association for England and Wales, told the BBC in 2014, shortly after Theresa May, the then home secretary, laid into the organisation at its annual conference (the police aren’t allowed to have a union and have been banned from striking since 1919). ‘We were the favoured group, always looked on by government as the people who did ...”

“... worse; if we go on as we are, the scientists warned, our planet’s near-to-medium-term outlook may well be grim.Cape Grim, aptly named in 1798 by its British discoverer, Matthew Flinders RN, is a 3o0-foot sandstone spike projecting into the Southern Ocean on the wind-whipped western coast of Tasmania. Here nine weather scientists reporting to the IPCC work ...”

“... monism. Since Nehamas is arguing for the coherence of Nietzsche’s writings, the intention may be to evince the final triumph of critical monism. But since the book also defends Nietzsche’s perspectivism, the view denying that we can aspire to anything more than one among many possible perspectives, I shall contend here that it leaves behind the ...”

“... river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover.’ This Churchillian passage may be among his current regrets. Naipaul spent the Eighties in hygienic Wiltshire, and at the end of the decade he was knighted for his services to literature. At this point he went once more to India, and has now published a third book, which ...”

“... the Roman conquerors will relax their vigilance, so enabling her to proceed with her suicide. It may be that Barton has decided, with New Critical severity, that Plutarch is one thing and the play another, that the subtle deception in the Greek account is simply absent from the drama – but can we be sure of this? At IV.xv.25, 49 Cleopatra told the dying ...”