“... but we know she’s in the Women’s Psychopathic Ward and that there’s a baby, who may or may not have died – probably not, because Marthe’s husband, Christopher, brings her a little twist of baby hair. Everything comes to Marthe not through her understanding but through the unmediated chaos of her ...”

“... the dead while at His feet God the Father is creating Adam and Eve.’ Vasari’s doctrinal doubts may be the reason for his faint praise of the composition. In the Mannerist figures, he sees ‘nothing of that skill and singular grace’ Pontormo had previously displayed: Jacopo, it seems to me, has not observed in any single place the organisation of ...”

“... and textual criticism, their classical revival style was profoundly retardataire. Petrarch may have pinned his hopes for literary immortality on works like his Latin epic Africa, but it was his vernacular Canzoniere that launched an international craze for sonnets, keeping the courtly love lyric in vogue for two more centuries. The runaway popularity ...”

“... temperamental difficulties.’ ‘If only Mr Earnest Waller could see me now!’ To the reader it may seem that Mr Waller was doing his best but somewhere in Parr the aggrieved teenager lives on. He is so obviously not lazy or inattentive that it is surprising he still minds. His success comes from exactly the opposite qualities. Precise attention, often to ...”

“... And families whom its air-cooled rear engine Will power to school. I’m saying this That you may take a pride in your work.’ Nervous execs whooshed him away For a photo session.                                        I lost my job In the first redundancies. ‘Does the daffodil have an income allocation ...”

“... of my life. None is good enough to keep Legacy ‘Do words just pop into your head?’ Some may go unexploded. * ‘Have you thought much about your legacy?’ I’m a legacy prisoner. No I’m not. * ‘What do you call precious?’ The precious doesn’t get around much so it stays small. Or it orbits the same small pronoun, a kid on a ...”

“... as the only man who sees. Hence his apparent meekness towards the artist, the hungry artist, we may add, which was noted by Brian Sewell when he and Peter went to David Hockney’s studio. His behaviour and utterance were always colourful, and artists warmed to him, as did taxi-drivers, policemen and women. He once said to me: ‘Patrick, you’ve got a ...”

“... dazzling the nomads with the sunshine on it. They sew up its door flaps with the ropes so no man may crawl through a tiny slit left at the bottom like a Western shirt missing a button. Then on dry highlands of Somalia we set their young girls to go dancing in virginity round the sutured hut: this is their sorrow in private places. They dance in a hurt, stiff ...”

“... The​ first thing that dies in Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (which will be in cinemas from 17 May) is a town called Empire, in Nevada. The life-supporting sheetrock plant shuts down, the people leave, even the zip code vanishes. A woman called Fern, played by Frances McDormand, takes up residence in a van. She spends a Christmas season working at an Amazon warehouse, and hopes for jobs elsewhere ...”

“... In the early afternoon of Monday, 8 May, a sealed A4 envelope was delivered by the Iranian Foreign Ministry to the Swiss Embassy in Tehran. The wire agencies were told that it contained a letter from Iran’s president, intended for his US counterpart. The news travelled fast. Ahmadinejad had written a letter. Might this be a turning point in US-Iran relations? The US denied any knowledge of it, while the Swiss merely confirmed its arrival and said that it would be sent on ‘as soon as possible ...”

“... way and a Persian version of around 1600 hangs beside it in the exhibition. The wall paintings he may have made have not survived. Questions of attribution create less anxiety here than they do in many exhibitions. It may be that the costume drawings are workshop copies; a date recently discovered in the Louvre Reception of ...”

“... allegedly in honour of a nebula – Alan McHughen, the scientist responsible, may be a mild-mannered biologist by day, but at night he’s an amateur astronomer. He’s dismissive of fears that the association with John Wyndham’s 1950s novel won’t do the controversy-strewn world of GM any favours; and he’s done that clever thing of ...”

“... soften the desire to see the drawings themselves, nor will the planned replica of the cave that may be built, following the model of Lascaux II. Herzog leads you to a place you will never visit and the sense of being inside the cave that the 3D image produces makes it all the more tantalising. You want to get your own torch and walk where the film-makers ...”

“... of the gods (who are explicitly compared in the poem to Rome’s ruling elite) – though there may be more appetite now than there used to be for scandal about those who are famous only for being scandalous. Meanwhile, there’s little chance of scandal derailing ‘compassionate, decent’ Paul Wolfowitz’s bid to become the next president of the World ...”

“... the last count, it has at least 38 moons. ‘At some time in the future,’ the IAU warns, ‘it may be advisable to stop naming very small satellites.’ Most of Uranus’s satellites are named after characters in Shakespeare – Trinculo is the latest addition – though two, Belinda and Umbriel, take their names from The Rape of the Lock. This ...”