“... might now have the regal expansiveness of Paris if the Whitehall Palace that Inigo Jones and John Webb drew up for Charles I had been built. Then our prime minister might be living not in the modest decency of Downing Street but in something more like the Hôtel Matignon. Passing it and other grand houses given over to government use in the rue de ...”

“... 5 per cent, sufficient for fuel but not for weapons, as suggested by the Liberal Democrat peer John Roper. That would probably be acceptable to Iran, which has said all along that what it wants is its own enrichment capability within the framework of the NPT. This proposal does, however, rely on the safeguards system, and would require that IAEA inspectors ...”

“... on their faces. They are Cardinals Bellini (Stanley Tucci), Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) and Tremblay (John Lithgow), respectively American, Nigerian and Canadian. The other favourite, Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), an Italian cardinal who is less discreet and more stagey, has a scene to himself. He is the film’s conservative. He wants masses to be spoken in ...”

“... no one spoke to Alison at all and ‘any who made approach to me were dexterously diverted.’ At John Hayward’s it was made clear that she must not say anything to T. S. Eliot. Nor did her lover protect her. He refused to introduce her to friends, saying on one occasion: ‘One doesn’t introduce a child.’ When Beryl was abroad, he allowed her to spend ...”

“... are note-like sketches – the one of hanged men, for example, or the drawings of the entourage of John VIII Palaeologus, the Byzantine Emperor, made when he was attending the Council of Ferrara in 1438 – but it is the worked-up studies which best meet Facio’s description: of a horse harness drawn as though to instruct a farrier, and the different ...”

“... perfectly squared, without the least winding or washboarding – flat as a sheet of plate glass. John Hersey, The Walnut Door three four knock at the door – imagine the door as subject no mystery just a coathanger a formal object on which for some reason you’ve to drape its own history – how it began – is began better than started? – began as the ...”

“... money from, pictures of this sort: for Sir George Beaumont The Blind Fiddler; for the financier John Julius Angerstein (who paid 800 guineas) The Village Holiday; for the Prince Regent Blind Man’s Buff (finished 1813). Wilkie became an associate and then a member of the Royal Academy while very young; he was knighted and made a painter to the King. He was ...”

“... are said by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen in his letter about Freud in this issue of the LRB, and by John Lanchester in his piece about Martin Amis. The note about Bartlett (who is identified as the ‘author’ of the book and owns the copyright) seems intended merely to spread a murky film over the question of whether or not this is really the work of Eva ...”

“... Did all Van Dyck’s male sitters really have the long-fingered, blue-veined hands that Lord John Stuart and his brother Lord Bernard share with the Abbé Scaglia and so many others? Were the hands of Rembrandt’s sitters really all solid and paw-like? Those of Jacob Trip, his wife, Margaretha de Geer, and Hendrickje Stoffels seem to be generated by the ...”

“... gardening has been the fashion.There have been times, however, when London’s green tide was out. John Evelyn’s intentions in writing Sylva (‘A discourse of forest and the propagation of timber in his majesties dominions’), published in 1664, were practical. The book answered a request from the Commissioners of the Navy to the Royal Society for advice ...”

“... that the extra information in the painted images, even to a degree in the photographed ones like John Coplans’s black and white prints, can bear being looked at for longer. There are colours the projector cannot match, there is information about how the painter used his hands, how he responded to the task of showing what an eye or a foot looks like, how he ...”

“... of a head, the angle of a leg, or the loop of a skipping rope add movement. English painters like John Bratby and Jack Smith were drawing on similar subjects with a not dissimilar, calculated clumsiness that trades crispness for directness, as though seeking to match the thing drawn in the accent of the drawing. ‘Catterline in Winter’, c.1963. Her ...”

“... Hondros tell their stories in Reporting Iraq, a gripping little book, put together by Mike Hoyt, John Palattella and their colleagues at the Columbia Journalism Review from hours of interviews with reporters and editors (Melville House, $21.95). Hoyt and Palattella have shaped their material to produce a roughly chronological account of the war in the words ...”

“... is a bust of Beethoven and a photograph of Lenin; magazines with the faces of Marilyn Monroe and John Lennon; small vases of dead flowers and strings of gleaming beads; a tiny Jesus and Virgin Mary, bathed in blue light; and the nonpareil marker of 1970s low-cost luxury, a Black Magic chocolate box.Bedsit aftermath, campy museum ...”

“... either, reluctantly agrees. In the present, Nora is married to another writer (Arthur, played by John Magaro), and Hae Sung has become an engineer. He announces that he would like to visit Nora in New York. Nora doesn’t think of saying no to the reunion, and Arthur is the person who makes the remarks I quoted earlier about the ‘story’ and being ‘part ...”