“... Canaletto of 1740s Westminster, renders a particular local streetscape with poignant acuity. Like John Akomfrah, the Ghanaian-born director of Handsworth Songs, the Venetian is reminding me what I take Britishness to look like. But their works come as oases in a fuzzy and overstretched survey, only flickeringly illumined by any emotional or formal ...”

“... draws     down her funds in Girls Gone Wild. Santino’s now   a vampire (Suck and swoon!). John Hurrell receives some surprising new information. Marius makes Armand a virgin   when Armand is seventeen, and Akasha’s like, that’s so     random! Who’s your secret server? After ingesting   derivatives Magnus too becomes a vampire. Anthony ...”

“... the subject as the campanile that reaches up into it, and Burne-Jones’s The Merciful Knight. John Frederick Lewis, who spent ten years in Cairo amassing drawings of Oriental life, came home and turned them into images like Hhareem Life, Constantinople, in which the detail is abundant and accurate but the atmosphere suburban English. In the end he gave up ...”

“... copies of Vogue, with black and white photographs by Penn, Avedon and Horst, and drawings by John Ward, Bouché, Eric and the rest, are still my best notion of what a sophisticated magazine should look like. The Post, with its Rockwell covers and advertisements for refrigerators of giant size, finned cars, and kitchens in which slim housewives lived the ...”

“... Gwen John’s attic bedroom, Edward Hopper’s Sun in an Empty Room, Adolf Menzel’s open window and blowing curtain, Andrew Wyeth’s New England rooms full of cold, hard light, Hammershøi’s frugal Danish ones and Van Gogh’s narrow bedroom: these are pictures you might choose if exiled to a desert island. Thinking of the inviting effect such paintings have I went looking for them in the National Gallery ...”

“... postponed. ‘The people of Abyei are the ones who shot the first bullet for revolution,’ John Ajiang Kiir, a local administrator in Abyei, proudly told me. This isn’t true but the sentiment is accurate enough: Ngok Dinka leaders say their people fought, died and suffered for the South’s independence, and to be left behind now would be a terrible ...”

“... Syria has for now turned into the war that never happened thanks to the gaffe that never was. Once John Kerry let slip that there was something Assad could do to head off a military strike – agree to international oversight of his chemical arsenal – the stalled march to war became a headlong retreat. Obama appears to have found a way out of the hole he had dug for himself, with a helping hand from Putin ...”

“... for finding things interesting, whether he liked them or not. Writing about Frank in the Guardian, John Sutherland called him a ‘fierce reader’ and the phrase was picked up by several newspapers here and in other countries. As he himself says, Sutherland was adapting Frank’s own expression, ‘fierce reading’, which comes at the start of his review of ...”

“... played with the idea that they were pantomime villains, a bit of a joke. ‘More Woody Allen than John Le Carré,’ the Sunday Times said, while nevertheless doing its best to turn its report into the raciest of spy stories, presenting a sexed-up version of the 55-page charge sheet released by the FBI – the only actual information anyone really has – as ...”

“... in Amritsar. More menacingly, over 180 Labour MPs signed a motion in 1973 for the dismissal of Sir John Donaldson. Donaldson, then a High Court judge and president of the National Industrial Relations Court, later master of the rolls, had sequestrated £100,000 held in the political fund of the Amalgamated Engineering Union as a penalty for contempt of ...”

“... of any Democrat partisans to Obama’s left. Hope somehow never dies. In 2008 Krugman supported John Edwards, then Hillary Clinton, and then fell in line behind Obama even though he saw his candidacy as a ‘cult of personality’. ‘There’s a trap I’ve seen some people fall into,’ he said in 2010, ‘you let your vision of what should be get ...”

“... a clean air act, or want to commiserate about the bad weather, as George VI did when he looked at John Piper’s drawings of Windsor Castle. You are struck by the observation of things that had not been seen before, or seen rarely, in pictures: things like the backs of the South London houses where Carel Weight set odd encounters that could have come from ...”

“... farms’ are. Well, some people do; but they like to keep it secret. According to John Hennessy and David Patterson’s Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (2002), in 2000 Google had 11,000 machines at four sites, two in Silicon Valley and two in Virginia. One thing that’s certain is that the farms are growing all the time, as new ...”

“... consciousness to her 17th-century work without violating its historical dimension. I’m sure John Broadbent spotted this very rare quality in her when he invited her to edit parts of the Cambridge Milton in the early 1970s. I can remember the intense, tortuous, day-long arguments – inevitably in the kitchen, but this time our Norwich kitchen in St ...”

“... San Suu Kyi; it might have been more interesting to denounce any or all of these. The title echoes John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, but that book did include some men by no means universally admired: George Norris, who attacked the Wilson administration’s infringement of neutrality during the Great War, or Robert Taft, who criticised the Nuremberg ...”