“... He grew up in Leicestershire and had lived in various places but it was Suffolk, where he’d spent childhood holidays, that he really loved.He had wanted to raise his son there, to work from home, be ‘supported by the landscape’ and go on long walks: he didn’t write much about walks or landscapes, but he did once mention how much he distrusted ...”

“... on Italy’s Balkan periphery overlooked by the watchtowers of communist Yugoslavia, where he’d been appointed director of the municipal asylum. Here the term – manicomio in Italian – was less controversial. Italy had had no equivalent of the 1930 Mental Treatment Act, and the legislation of 1904 that governed such institutions in Italy conceived them ...”

“... on global supply chains, there isn’t all that much the Bank of England or anyone else can do about it. Raising interest rates acts as a signal that the bank still takes its responsibilities seriously (it does, after all, have an official mandate to pursue an inflation target of 2 per cent), but while interest rate rises may have the effect of ...”

“... and general ineptitude. So – much like the 17th-century high seas – America’s highways are, de facto, beyond the law. It’s hard to distinguish between the homeless nomad ‘prole’ pirates and the military officers who set up road blocks and demand payoff to feed the starving troops. What has bankrupted the US economy is a different form of ...”

“... nigglers could write irresistible ‘page-turners’ and make their fortunes, why did they not do so? It is a fair guess this edgy Scot would have despised current television programmes about books, concluding (as many other have already concluded) that these are designed to put the masses off reading. It was MacLean’s good fortune to start writing when ...”

“... produced any better or more effective public servants than Oliver Franks, Edwin Plowden, Robert Hall, Edward Bridges, Alec Cairncross, Edward Hall-Patch, Richard Hopkins and Roger Makins, to name only a few of the ‘mandarins’ who served the Labour Government so loyally. Therein lay the problem, however. They did what ...”

“... would certainly disagree, and he has the data; but, curiously, Emerson’s wives (and children) do not come into very sharp focus. Ellen died too young (her death, and, later, the death of his young son Waldo, were probably the two events that moved Emerson most deeply). Oddly, he opened Ellen’s coffin in 1832, and Waldo’s coffin in 1857, and Richardson ...”

“... work, are missing: no jockeys, few portraits, no brothels, no street and café scenes, no music-hall singers. Landscapes, more of them than you might expect from a painter who was so scornful of the genre (and some of them in curiously lurid before-the-storm-colours), share the simplified outlines and generalised forms which distinguish the pictures of ...”

“... were as reverential as its title. After maintaining that Cromwell’s ‘Grandeur he deriv’d from Heav’n alone’, that all his ‘parts [were] so equal perfect’, and that ‘Peace was the Prize of all his toils and care,’ Dryden predicted that ‘His Ashes in a peaceful Urne [would] rest.’ It was not to be. Less than two years later, Dryden ...”

“... On 22 March​ 2012, David Cameron visited Kings Science Academy in Bradford, one of the first wave of 24 free schools that opened in September 2011. You can see footage of his visit online. The prime minister walks through the playground, hampered by children in grey blazers, with the school’s headteacher, Sajid Raza, at his elbow ...”

“... he moved furniture around a living room to make room for an ungainly TV console. ‘You can’t do that,’ the executive said. ‘You’re making fun of television.’Caesar claimed that network censorship made him and his writers more creative, which is as may be; what’s certain is that it defanged American comedy and completely eliminated the phallic ...”

“... with the theme of the forest and trees central to the Nazi myth. In a picture recalling Caspar David Friedrich’s The Chasseur in the Forest, Kiefer paints himself in a white gown, holding a burning branch in a thick forest, the oil layered and dripping as if the work was itself the outcome of a pagan rite. With Kiefer there is always a sense of meanings ...”

“... I assumed would be a rather predictable day of protest, of marching and shouting. I figured I’d head home with tired feet, a sore throat and the nagging sense that we hadn’t accomplished much. Instead I enjoyed a long afternoon with one of the many small groups that filled the square. Movement veterans like the anarchist anthropologist ...”

“... Almost five years ago the Cape Town publishing company David Philip brought out Way Up Way Out, a novel by Harold Strachan. Some time later I was sent a copy of the book by a friend of Strachan’s in KwaZulu-Natal, where the author himself has lived much of his life. His name on the cover meant nothing to me – though if I had been more quick-witted I might have connected it to his second trial and period of imprisonment during the apartheid years ...”

“... only a story – than about the nature of the fictional imagination, about inspiration: ‘Where do they come from, the tall Polish pianist and the elegant woman with the gliding walk, the banker’s wife who occupies her days in good works? All year they have been knocking at the door, wanting to be let in or else dismissed and laid to rest. Now, at ...”