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“... So​ far Joe Biden has fulfilled the promise of his campaign. His administration has been mostly dull, and nothing has radically changed. Towards the end of the summer, after the US evacuation from Kabul, his approval rating dipped below 50 per cent and over the autumn it sank into the low 40s. In the media he’s widely seen as a lame duck, as columnists speculate about whether he will run for a second term in 2024, at the age of 81, or be replaced by a pundit’s dream ticket of Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg ...”

“... winter and I was watching humpback whales. This time I hardly dared lift the binoculars. That’s never happened to me before: a reluctance to go to the coast and, once there, a reluctance to scan the waves. But twenty miles due east down the firth stands the Bass Rock, the biggest gannetry on earth. The Bass is the plug of an ancient ...”

“... she was chairing a discussion of the Gainsborough exhibition then at Tate Britain. Gainsborough’s landscapes, she invited one of her panel to agree, were ‘irrelevant’. She meant, I think, that they had nothing to say to the present day, and I can’t forget her remark only because I repeat it so often to my ...”

“... is spare, the South proliferative; the West bland, the East astringent … Well, for something so simple and seemingly arbitrary, there is probably more truth in it than there ought to be. The Swede Tomas Tranströmer was for our time the poet of the North, the pendant – to use the obvious parallel – to Ingmar Bergman, in one of whose early films he ...”

“... Last year’s bicentennial of Britain’s outlawing of the Atlantic slave trade inspired a host of scholarly and popular commemorations: conferences, exhibitions, even a big-budget film, Amazing Grace, that made an unlikely matinee idol of William Wilberforce. All these events took place in an atmosphere suffused with self-congratulation ...”

“... The​ 21st-century version of Aristotle’s Poetics – and for that matter of Cicero’s On the Orator, Robert McKee’s Story, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the entire works of Syd Field, and just about every other book ever written that pretends to reveal the ways fiction, drama or poetry ‘work’ – is tvtropes ...”

“... Light​ falls on the side of a woman’s upturned face, travels over her right shoulder and forearm and then down to her thigh and knee. The limbs are dense and opaque, the solid curve of the upper arm mirroring the heavy bent leg with its bluish shadows of muscle. The flesh is massive but yielding: the woman’s left breast bulges and puckers like real tissue as she grasps it between the fingers of one hand ...”

“... wants it. Levy is best known for her portraits, in the New Yorker, of women who test society’s boundaries, or run up hard against them, and she has often hinted at her own stake in these stories. There was Caster Semenya, the South African runner forced to endure hormone testing and endless discussion as to whether her physical attributes should ...”

“... white supremacy.But how much do we know about the exercise of police force, despite seeing so much? The controversy and protests that followed the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 exposed the lack of official data on police killings. Two newspapers launched ...”

“... of Defence to see the Home Secretary. Roy Jenkins rose from his chair and said: ‘Well, it’s all over, Callaghan is appointing Crosland.’ He nodded to a handwritten envelope addressed to the President of the French Republic. I knew that it contained a letter declaring his willingness to become President of the European community. We talked for a ...”

“... John Minton’s face is familiar – if not from the self-portrait now in the National Portrait Gallery, then from the likeness he commissioned from Lucian Freud and bequeathed to the Royal College of Art. It is very long, large-eyed, hollow-cheeked, with a receding chin and dark tousled hair. Photographs suggest that the self-portrait is a better physical likeness; the truth about his emotional state seems to lie with Lucian Freud ...”

“... It is doubly appropriate that Professor Burrow’s 1985 Carlyle Lectures were published in 1988, for the year that marked the tercentenary of the revolution whose principles became the touchstone of Whig orthodoxy also turned out to be the year in which, after well over a century, the term ‘Liberal’ lost its separate identity in our political vocabulary, having become merged in a composite destined to be known for short as ‘Democrats ...”

“... You’d think it would be prime-time viewing. A Frenchwoman, a survivor of Hitler’s death camps, helps an ingenious young Dutch Socialist to outwit the Scrooge-like Establishment. Hundreds of millions of pounds are at stake. The rank-and-file defy the mighty. Law confronts power. Three Governments risk being taken to court ...”

“... In the current issue of a magazine called The Face there is an article on Norman Mailer’s recent visit to this country. He was here, it seems, to promote Tough guys don’t dance, his latest novel: he did some ‘major’ TV interviews, a bit of radio, and – towards the end of his stint – he called a press conference in order to complain about the low quality of the reviews he had been getting ...”

“... or well-rolled umbrellas. How else explain the perverse logic of the business, on the face of it so unnecessary and counterproductive, even by Marxist standards? In his bones Pushkin was no doubt aware that his status as a poet depended on the shamanistic independence and authority which Tsarist oppression bestowed on him. The poet was ex officio a rival ...”