“... in the museum they allow light to stream in.A curatorial delegation arrived in New York in May 1975 for the first round of acquisitions. They bought Jackson Pollock’s Mural on Indian Red Ground; several Picassos, including Open Window on the Rue de Penthièvre in Paris; and de Kooning’s Light in August. In the months that followed, these were ...”

“... blows his mind; he wants to write the way Rodin sculpts. But the rest he can take or leave. In May 1902, he visits the Louvre and is unimpressed by David and Velázquez. He mistakes Chardin’s eggs for onions. ‘Nothing here means anything to me.’ As he leaves the museum he sees a blackbird, poised against a wall of ...”

“... neck’ (Roger Shattuck); ‘Sun neck cut’ (Beverley Bie Brahic); ‘Let the sun beheaded be’ (David Lehman); ‘Sun sundered head’ (Martin Sorrell); ‘Sun throat cut’ (Ron Padgett). The compression of this lurid image of the dawn must have greatly appealed to Beckett; indeed his streamlined version possibly takes its cue from the phrase, for it ...”

“... in Lake Charles don’t look good at all. In neighbourhoods such as Greinwich Terrace, where in May the floods came on so fast that people didn’t have time to get into their cars to escape, the houses look as though they could be taken apart by hand. In Oak Park they look as though they could be pushed into the concrete gully that runs down the central ...”

“... saying they valued those very queries.’ While McChrystal’s macho style and stupid questions may have had a certain appeal, it’s possible that he was valued more for his military connections. It’s hard not to be reminded of the fraudulent blood-testing corporation Theranos, whose board included Sam Nunn, a former head of the US Senate’s Armed ...”

“... Behind me is Gibraltar’) were making him more influential than he had been as a politician. In May 1956, rather startlingly, Wyatt decided to test this proposition. Reporting on elections at the Amalgamated Engineering Union, in which he expected the Communist Party to make gains, he delivered a speech rather than a summary to AEU members and his other ...”

“... greatest tyrant that ever was in England … I wot not what Nero, what Dionysius, or what Mahomet may be compared unto him.’ Walker’s subject is the response to that incipient tyranny of some of Henry’s own subjects; not so much the resisters we learn about from Bernard – high-profile politicians and churchmen, More and Fisher and Pole, or the cast of ...”

“... Germany. ‘If we . . . can’t despite everything be at least optimistic for ourselves then we may as well pack up.’ Politically, it was more complicated: ‘My university comrades and I are racking our brains as to what kinds of intervention in the life of civil society we might make. We are completely at a loss as to where we, especially as Jews, can ...”

“... about the ‘true’ writings of Karl Ove Knausgaard, or the huge amount of attention paid to David Shields’s polemic Reality Hunger. Time and again we hear about a new desire for the real, about a realism which is realistic set against an avant-garde which isn’t, and so on. It’s disheartening that such simplistic oppositions are still being put ...”

“... small donors in America will be of little consequence if the billionaire businessmen Charles and David Koch make good on their promise to spend $900 million to help the Republicans. Citizens United divided the Supreme Court along the usual lines. All the justices appointed by Reagan or the Bushes were for it. The rest weren’t. Justice Stevens, appointed by ...”

“... a very long day to egress on foot: if you leave at around 7 a.m., and are reasonably fit, you may find yourself in open fields late that evening. Following Connolly, what this says about London I’m not absolutely sure: all I do know is that after doing a couple of these radial walks – first northeast, then due south – I was altogether more grounded ...”

“... well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of these writers – however popular or influential, however frequently their writing appeared in the Paris Review or Conjunctions or the year-end Best American and Pushcart anthologies – managed to stir him. The ‘tone of mandarin ...”

“... Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.’ And again, in Constance Garnett’s much ...”

“... a similar culture. Husain now thinks that Hizb ut-Tahrir should be banned; in this, he agrees with David Cameron, who is upset by Gordon Brown’s refusal to follow up on his predecessor’s promise to eradicate it. In an email sent to various news organisations after reviews of The Islamist began to appear, Hizb ut-Tahrir said that Husain’s experience in ...”

“... that suited her best. Johnson was soon the star attraction of a circle that included Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Frances Burney and Joshua Reynolds, whose portraits of the group adorned the walls of the library in Streatham. Hester presided with remarkable wit, vivacity and in Burney’s neologism, ‘agreeability’; in both contemporary ...”