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“... Indeed, it seems to me that at the Tate many of the late paintings look as if they are Medieval wall-paintings. Since everything they are contradicts the aesthetics of the easel-painting tradition, to say that they look like frescos here is to say that here they come into their own. That consummation, by the way, has nothing to impede it when they are ...”

“... we are back with the daily papers. One bright interlude, ‘a curious reprise to the past’, is Richard Nixon’s consultation with Malraux before the President’s departure for China in 1972 (a voyage of discovery code-named ‘Polo II’). ‘Mr President,’ Malraux declared, ‘you operate within a rational framework, but Mao does not. There is ...”

“... an ‘almost manic system of walls and moats’. The perimeter of the estate was marked by a high wall designed to bounce back traffic noise, and to allow for oblique views through it, but which made the site seem heavily fortified. Garages were sunk into a ‘moat’, giving the building the appearance of a medieval keep, a besieged island successfully ...”

“... it is as if Shakespeare at the time of The Tempest had been forced by an old contract to rewrite Richard III.) One way out of this quandary – for it does not feel right to historians that the golden years of the High Renaissance should leave behind such a central, equivocal instance of ‘progress’ – has been to doubt that what we see in London is ...”

“... Philippe Sands, a prominent proponent of this view, claims that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ‘the liberal Anglo-American vision of a rules-based international system appeared to be becoming a reality.’ True, there had been some backsliding in the Clinton years, but nothing to compare with what happened in response to 9/11. According to the ...”

“... called The Mirror in Europe, Particularly in France. There are passing references to Shakespeare (Richard II’s famous mirror soliloquy) and there’s an excellent extended analysis of a passage in Rilke, as well as scattered references to other European writers; and many of the paintings are German or Dutch. But most of the literary sources are French, and ...”

“... whom he had few nice things to say, and his impressionable, mentally unstable younger brother, Richard, about whom Parker has turned up new material – much of which also makes one think badly of Isherwood. With his family disowned, he formed what would be his longest – and wholly asexual – friendship at Repton, with Edward Upward. Close and ...”

“... producing a more diffuse cultural logic. This is manifest in the novels of Karl Ove Knausgaard, or Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood, where the ‘big data’ mentality of capturing every biographical detail over time is elevated to an artform. This cultural epoch introduces a distinct set of problems. Which event from the past will pop up next? How can a ...”

“... critics of America, who figure that they are unlikely to be assassinated in the vicinity of Wall Street and Rockefeller Centre. In 2006, Hugo Chávez delivered free heating oil to the South Bronx and ostentatiously paid off the debts of Hispanic NGOs in the city. For Castro in the 1960s, Harlem was a useful place to expose American injustice. He made a ...”

“... might expect. As well as Slonimsky’s hymn to Castoria, there are Samuel Beckett’s radio plays, Richard Serra’s video art, Maurice Blanchot’s mystery novels and a 1971 promotional disc made by Salvador Dalí for the Crédit Commercial de France. One of UbuWeb’s specialities is the B-sides and rarities overshadowed by an artist’s greatest hits. Want ...”

“... is what we would call ideology which comes between the world outside and the shadows on the cavern wall. For Ricoeur, the utopian strategy can be the only possible escape – if escape it is – from the hermeneutical circle since, unlike the flight to science, it presupposes no ‘transcendent onlooker’, no place outside the circle, although Ricoeur, in ...”

“... of the orthodox neoconservative faction who once co-wrote an article with John McCain in the Wall Street Journal claiming that the overthrow of Gaddafi would lead to ‘a democratic and pro-American Libya’. Rubio is preoccupied with schemes to destabilise Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. As late as 2022 he was criticising Trump’s ‘unfortunate’ praise of ...”

“... Middle East, reforming the criminal justice system, overseeing the building of the Mexican border wall, diplomacy with China, the 2020 re-election campaign and the creation of an Office of American Innovation dedicated to entirely revamping the way the government works. His efforts at procurement have been disastrous, and there is a continuing nationwide ...”

“... zebra on a wooden plinth. Like something out of place and menacing, sticking its head through the wall in an early Lucian Freud painting. The questing sociologist has an agenda. She is our nominated surrogate in occupied territory. And she is persistent. She comes back until the required witnesses can be persuaded to share a drink and a stroll, to confess in ...”

“... Partnership was repudiated, and a few hours later Trump ordered the construction of the promised wall with Mexico; an absolute ban was issued on immigration from seven Islamic countries, and a warning given to American ‘sanctuary cities’: if they refused to co-operate with plans for the detention of undocumented immigrants, they would lose federal ...”