“... made a ‘five-figure contribution’; the rest was covered by the then owners of the hotel, David and Frederick Barclay, identical twins who appeared on the Sunday Times Rich List later that month with a combined fortune of £2.3 billion.This wasn’t the first time the Barclays had helped to house Thatcher. After leaving Number Ten she had moved into ...”

“... sort of connection. When he writes that ‘the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good,’ he means that the one relates to the other by way of a set of analogies: as the one pleases immediately, so does the other; as the one assumes a universality it can never (and need not) prove, so does the other, and so on. He does not say that one leads to the ...”

“... Shelley, need not be read as simple Neoplatonism: both use idealist language strategically, as a means of averting both mechanical materialism and conventional religious discourse. Gish complains that the poem’s unifying symbol, the curly snake alluded to in the title, is not concretely present: but rather than playing a futile game of hunt-the-serpent it ...”

“... also took an interest in towns and villages, and in what was to be apprehended there by some means other than transparency. We might think of that interest as an interest in the virtual realities produced either by a change in the position of the observer, or by a machine: The least change in our point of view, gives the whole world a pictorial air. A ...”

“... There are obvious overlaps between the Orbán and Trump playbooks – from winning elections by means of right-wing populism, via gerrymandering, packing the courts and attacking civil society institutions, to claiming to be the sole defender of national sovereignty. Like Trumpism, Orbánism pits city against country – in Hungary, ‘the people of the ...”

“... and powerful than any that Thomson and his contemporaries can have had nightmares about, the means of catering for the often startlingly expensive tastes of that justly discriminating public can no longer be taken for granted. In that sense, the popular success of Górecki constitutes a threat distinctly different from that of a Philip Glass or a Steve ...”

“... David Sylvester, who contributed regularly to this paper, died last June. People who worked with him usually agree that he was the most engaged and patient looker at art they ever knew. Robert Rosenblum rightly says, in David Sylvester: The Private Collection, that there was something comical about his high seriousness, but it is also true that, ‘unlike the rest of us ironists’, he could make one feel (or at least feel one ought to feel) that ‘art might matter more than life itself ...”

“... that Oxford should not be unrepresented, history for them simply the Boat Race carried on by other means.28 February. At the National Theatre to discuss a possible adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, I run into Tony Harrison the poet. He talks about Trackers, the play he has written and is directing about two papyrologists who piece together the fragments ...”

“... the new study of forensics had given the police, ‘the principle of the trace and so on’. As David Gibson recounts in Planting Clues, Locard was also a keen botanist. One of the scores of cases he included in his textbooks described a man who had been found murdered in the countryside outside Lyon. A group of suspects was rounded up. Inspecting one of ...”

“... to fry). To write about the works of Hazlitt, one needs a bias towards history and philosophy. David Bromwich’s study concentrates on the latter discipline, for he is appraising Hazlitt’s understanding of Abstract Ideas and his command of words to express them. But there is also a historical theme running through this excellent book, accompanying the ...”

“... man. Singer’s story comes alive when he talks about his own family. His maternal grandparents, David Ernst Oppenheim and Amalie née Pollak, were remarkable. David (1881-1943) came from a distinguished line of rabbis that included David Oppenheim (1664-1736), the Chief Rabbi of ...”

“... book features a cartoon from the Independent: an apocalyptic lightning flash strikes and anoints David Cameron, while Brown and Alistair Darling flee London as Parliament quakes against the background of a setting sun. Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party is less dramatic: we see Brown, Mandelson and Blair in a morning-after sprawl; Brown’s big toe ...”

“... are commonly brought up to show that the modernist impetus survived in the generation after Pound: David Jones, Anglo-Welshman; Basil Bunting, Northumbrian Englishman; and Hugh MacDiarmid, Lowland Scot. The claim for Jones seems the weakest: it is advanced by Jones’s admirers, not by the poet himself, who took no interest in the question, having other fish ...”

“... even further away? Eight years later, in the Deheisha refugee camp on the occupied West Bank, David Grossman experienced a faintly similar phenomenon. He was listening to an old Palestinian woman remembering her past, in the village of Ain Azrab, baking bread over a straw fire, the woman all the time unconsciously working her fingers through the motion of ...”

“... This book contains reflections on both history and theory, and is written with David Marquand’s usual elegance and intelligence. Its 19 essays concern themes familiar to readers of his biography of Ramsay MacDonald and his distinguished study, The Unprincipled Society: how can we devise for modern Britain an appropriate ‘social democratic’ theory of social action, and how can we construct a ‘progressive’ coalition which might give it adequate electoral support ...”