“... course, has promised to sort it all out. He began by asking his deputy national security adviser John Brennan to investigate why the system had failed to stop Mutallab. Brennan’s previous job was as CEO of the Analysis Corporation, a private firm which provides intelligence and IT services to government agencies. One of its past services was to build ...”

“... blue room; a Hopper of a woman in an empty theatre; Witness, a smashed face by Jenny Saville; and John Currin’s Rotterdam – pornography as Norman Rockwell might have painted it. There are installations, such as Damien Hirst’s table of surgical instruments below photographs of a smashed eye and smashed limbs. There are DVD projections and sculpture. This ...”

“... it clear what religious images should do in the world: inspire devotion and emulation. Saints – John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila – had used them as stimulants to spirituality. In Alonso Cano’s The Vision of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, the saint kneels before a painted statue of the Virgin and Child. She directs a thin stream of milk ...”

“... who showed themselves to be the intellectual heirs of the didactic Victorian tradition. John Berger, in the New Statesman, complained that the show demonstrated that ‘industrial capitalism has now destroyed the standards of Popular Taste and substituted for them standards of gentility, Bogus-Originality and competitive cultural ...”

“... and the like. I blame the memory of frilled and succulent Triffids in a television adaptation of John Wyndham in the early 1980s.) But what if these aversions turned more physically insistent and unsettling? Imagine a world in which the mere sight of a pen or pencil triggered a pricking of your thumbs, in which you felt fork tines rip your flesh from across ...”

“... organisers might have borne this in mind when writing some of their condescending text panels. John Bargrave is taken to task for not distinguishing between the ‘categories’ of ‘antiquity’ and ‘curiosity’ in his 17th-century cabinet, but they were not clear categories in his day. Antiquarianism flourished before history was a profession, or ...”

“... were culled from the Bookseller). The current situation in the hit parade is this: were it not for John Grisham, whose A Painted House was leading Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers by 7201 ‘units’ – which presumably means ‘books’ – to 1964 for the week ending 24 February 2001, the end of February would be one of the less impressive times of ...”

“... as a bit too cuddly and open, and makes you long for the days of secrecy and high adventure before John Major passed the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, which not only publicly acknowledged the existence of SIS for the first time, to absolutely no one’s surprise, but also made it subject to Parliamentary oversight. Or it may be that it strikes you as a load ...”

“... there would clearly be consequences. Before the Chilcot Report was published I interviewed Sir John Holmes, who in 2002 and 2003 was Britain’s ambassador in France. He told me there was ‘a lot of unease’ in the FCO about an invasion. ‘For example,’ he said, ‘I wrote privately from Paris to the permanent under-secretary saying I was very worried ...”

“... 1760s, conceals beneath its plump spout a delicately painted ‘45’ in reference to Number 45 of John Wilkes’s Radical paper the North Briton, which attacked Lord Bute’s ministry as ‘the foul dregs of power, the tools of corruption and despotism’. The issue was ordered to be burned, with the usual consequence that everybody heard about it. Benjamin ...”

“... found itself in the ignominious position of having the highest death toll in Europe,’ John Kampfner writes in his new book, Why the Germans Do It Better (Atlantic, £16.99):Germany, having tested a large cross-section of its population, had a high number of recorded cases. But the death rate, as a proportion of the population, was tiny compared to ...”

“... the Crucifixion has been engraved, with Christ at the centre, his arms outstretched, and Mary and John the Evangelist below. When turned over and viewed through the thickness of the egg-shaped cabochon, the scene of Christ’s painful sacrifice is magnified. Depending on the light source and your viewpoint, his body contorts this way and that, and Mary and ...”

“... Towne (there are a couple of his pictures in the exhibition, so you can make comparisons) and John Sell Cotman. He took from them – or so one guesses – ideas about the relation of watercolour wash to the drawn structure underneath, and a way of simplifying landscape into a pattern. In his work for Wedgwood and in his illustrations he offered a ...”

“... wood panelling, windows and the sky beyond, than it was in the collection’s former gallery in St John’s Wood, where it reflected a glass roof. You walk into it down a narrowing, steel-walled, waist-high passage, where black oil rises to the rim and stretches out all around you. The tank is neatly tailored to follow the room’s walls, mouldings and ...”

“... When Hans Schmoller​ first saw a copy of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing – the book was published in 1972 – he hurled it across the room. Schmoller, who had succeeded Jan Tschichold as designer at Penguin in 1949, was a subtle practitioner of traditional book design. His pages were balanced, proper and elegant ...”