“... in the works he examined were often where he could hear it most plainly. The art of criticism lay in knowing what to listen out for, and having heard it, to identify and characterise it. ‘I suppose the thing about Hardy is,’ Bayley would typically begin, as though together we were to try and get to the bottom of a fascinating, but ...”

“... in the Austrian Alps. His methods were in keeping with his approach to philosophy: he did not lay claim to any special authority and instead of expounding facts and theories he asked his pupils questions and left them to work out the answers for themselves. When Hermine happened to see him at work she marvelled at his capacity to hold their ...”

“... eyes of most commentators, there were two prime suspects: the responsibility for the Brexit vote lay with either economic privation or cultural loss. In The Lure of Greatness, Anthony Barnett, the founder of Charter 88 and co-founder of Open Democracy, has identified a third: the constitution. Those who focus on the economic explanation, for Brexit as for ...”

“... afford to buy their works.Sickert’s and Clark’s belief that the health of art in their time lay in modest private patronage was a tacit admission that opportunities for painting’s equivalent of the big production number – altarpieces, history paintings, group portraits in council chambers – were either unavailable or compromised. Even in ...”

“... disastrous Comet crashes, and decided to veto the planned V1000 jet on the grounds that the future lay with turbo-props, not jets. This meant that when the Boeing 707s appeared there was no British competitor, and when BOAC begged that Rolls-Royce engines at least be used in the Boeings, Maudling dismissed this obviously sensible (and ultimately ...”

“... to shoulder in the dock here – Lacan, Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Deleuze/Guattari and one or two lesser figures – turn out not to know their mathematical arse from their physical elbow when they choose to steal food from Sokal and Bricmont’s professional larder, and start citing Gödel or Quantum Mechanics or ...”

“... was either neglected or rejected by the comic tradition. Fielding claimed to find more wit in St Paul. Petronius, perhaps, was too subversive. His genre-chaos and his moral chaos make the other pícaros look quite proper. The same anarchic qualities eventually endeared him to literary revolutionaries at the end of the 19th century. The decadents loved the ...”

“... he wrote to his wife. So much for that famous peaceableness.) More serious exponents were Paul Claudel, poet and diplomat (Shanghai, he wrote in 1896, was ‘an industrious honeycomb communicating in all its parts, perforated like an ant-hill’), and Victor Segalen, poet, novelist and physician, who travelled in China between 1909 and 1917. More ...”

“... to be the legitimate descendant of the Roman imperium. Charles may never, as he wearily told Pope Paul III in 1536, have had any ambition to be the master of the universe – dominus totius orbis – as which his advisors and panegyrists had so often portrayed him. But he certainly aimed at keeping his scattered domains as one polity, with one ruler, one ...”

“... could easily have been withdrawn. Why should Lebedinsky invent such a far-fetched tale if not to lay claim to a special intimacy with the tormented genius? The same wish seems also to underlie his account of Shostakovich’s becoming a Party member in 1960. Lebedinsky portrays himself as the composer’s confidant and conscience, warning him that ...”

“... But his, like Plutarch’s after him, was a lone voice. A huge industry of hunters and traders lay behind the Roman excesses, and took its toll: lions effectively disappeared from North Africa, tigers and elephants from Persia and the rest of Western Asia. The Old Testament launched the Judaeo-Christian tradition on a different course that was equally ...”

“... she explored how changing visions of family relations in 18th-century French society lay behind the radical left’s hysterical demonisation of Marie-Antoinette, and, more broadly, behind the transition from a paternalistic monarchy to a fraternal republic. That book delved into 18th-century art and literature, gathering up representations of the ...”

“... performance of Schoenberg’s music. Kokoschka wrote for the theatre. According to the playwright Paul Kornfeld, ‘a drama by Kokoschka is only a variation on his pictures and vice versa. Tone and melody, rhythm and gesture in his words are paralleled by the same effects in his pictures.’ Drama and spectacle, the arts as one, life as full-bodied ...”

“... in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Colombia supported his Atlantic Charter, hoping that it would lay the foundation for an international social democratic order. By 1943, Roosevelt was holding up the ‘illustration of the republics of this continent’ as a model for postwar liberal multilateralism. Though he took credit for overcoming ‘many times 21 ...”

“... is the cheerfully unconvincing Cornwall of ‘Souvenir’, with its headless dogs and two old men, Paul and Paul, playing a traditional Lenten prank, putting on a sort of lugubrious cabaret turn for the tourists who drink elaborate cocktails – Sheep Dip, Blimlets, Blue Skies – in a hotel bar. The American edition of The ...”