“... of much thinned siennas and umbers, with prods here and there of dun greens, whites and hot rose madder. To take the pictures in felt like slowly coming to in an unfamiliar bedroom. In each, the prods had gathered together to produce an Indian soldier. I enjoyed – and I felt that the painter had enjoyed – the visible process through which loose ...”

“... to create’. Sober liberal observers, like the International Crisis Group, an NGO founded by Mark Malloch Brown in 1995, more quietly worry about the absence of checks on presidential power in Venezuela and the possibility that Bolivia will actually fall apart. Enthusiastic radicals, like Tariq Ali and Diana Raby, suggest that a truly popular socialism ...”

“... In the summer​ of 1935, when he was 18, Robert Lowell and two friends from St Mark’s School – Blair Clark and Frank Parker – rented a house in Nantucket. Under Lowell’s direction, they studied the Bible (with special attention to the Book of Job) and ate cereal with raw honey and ‘badly’ cooked eels ...”

“... its moment, explains some of its flaws as well as its significance. Polanyi wanted to make his mark on the postwar settlement, to warn of the dangers of divorcing the economy from society. But his book received little acclaim on either side of the Atlantic. His daughter, the Canadian economist Kari Polanyi Levitt, wrote in 1990 that in England, ‘where ...”

“... best estimate of the amount of gold held by the Bank of England on a given future day. Circulation rose enormously because of canny publicity, and because entrants had to find five witnesses for their guess. Harmsworth was the one who made real money from the competition: the winner died of TB eight years later. He branched out into new publications, notably ...”

“... the stick-up thatch, the all-over-the-place arms and legs. Ross’s body resembled a huge question-mark, somebody said – perhaps too neatly. Thurber found it indescribable: those arms and legs were never still. ‘He was always in mid-flight, or on the edge of his chair, alighting or about to take off.’ Harpo Marx said that Ross looked like a cowboy who ...”

“... of Basel before returning to marry, start a family and build a career in the linen trade. He rose to modest heights in St Gall’s government, amassed a reasonable fortune and formed cordial if rarely intimate relationships with the town’s intellectual elite. Rütiner was a convinced Protestant and a keen (though not particularly scholarly) reader, but ...”

“... there was nothing left of the rat but a shrivelled sack of skin and fur, its tail a mangy question mark. I donned washing-up gloves, picked it up by the tail and put it in the bin. I blocked all the holes I could see and hoped that would be the end of the matter. But for months afterwards I was haunted by thoughts of rats. At night, I imagined I could hear the ...”

“... and Captain Ahab, the thinking whale’s man. For Melville, as for Chase, malice is the authentic mark of the whale’s intelligence. A century and a half after the book was published, that association has become harder to sustain. The malign and the dangerous haven’t disappeared from the picture – far from it – but they’ve fallen away from the ...”

“... all around you were either slaving away or – worse – out of work would have been sufficient to mark you out as a ‘lady’. What could be grander than lounging around upstairs, nibbling at the stock when the fancy took you, brushing out your curls? She and Katie would still spend hour upon hour getting ready to go out – to Cardiff, or to Pontypridd, to ...”

“... TV screens to announce his resignation as president in favour of Putin – is often taken to mark a major turning point, from the ‘fevered 1990s’ to the stability of the ‘Zero Years’, as the 2000s are known, the moment when Yeltsin’s erratic improvisation gave way to the cold calculation personified in Putin. Economically, the prolonged ...”

“... criticism. Parker evidently thinks there has been too much bullshit in wine writing, that it’s a mark of corruption, and that both a simplified vocabulary for talking about wine and a more straightforward sensibility towards what makes wine good are ways of cleansing the Augean stables of the wine world. He’s a bluff, straightforward sort of guy and, if ...”

“... Book of Horace Paraphrased’. One might list more obviously poetic lines of Pope like ‘Die of a Rose in aromatic Pain’, but better are lines that merely, yet perfectly enact the unremittingly alert language we call poetry: the exact comedy of bowls ‘obliquely waddling to the mark in view’; the just comparison of ...”

“... the first Glanmore sonnet, that he is ‘quickened with a redolence/Of farmland as a dark unblown rose’? The poet himself had doubts, as can be seen from his pruning back in Field Work of the even plusher ‘redolence/Of the fundamental dark unblown rose’ used in Hedge School. It is as though, by opening up a longer ...”

“... of the origin of the world, but of the origin of evil, of human suffering and death, in which the mark of man’s rebelliousness is in part his sheer fertility. It is like peering into the crucible of theodicy. Notwithstanding the enormous difference of monotheism, we see something very similar in the early chapters of Genesis (the Israelites would have ...”