“... dogs, which were then sold as pets. The prairie dog keepers began to fall ill with monkeypox in May; 72 people were infected, all recovered, and none spread the infection to their human contacts. In Europe there have been only a few monkeypox cases in recent years, all involving a history of travel to Africa. So the big outbreak that started in the middle ...”

“... we’re haring around Oxford with Rimington’s characters – quite a few of them muttering ‘May Allah be with you’ – and feeling she’s got the hang of it. Oxford works well as the setting for her dénouement and allows her to make the hard-boiled point, dear to writers of related genres, that you needn’t be clever to be bright. As Blackwell’s ...”

“... technique, told him to stop, because if he was any good he’d be terrible. Artists themselves may want to keep their innocence for all sorts of reasons: pleasure in detailing facts lost in more sophisticated representations, in making patterns out of things (the flower-beds in the two Rousseau full-length portraits of women in the exhibition are set out ...”

“... they upload, but there have been no significant cases so far of anyone trying to enforce it. That may be because so few users think they are doing anything original. There is instead a popular urge to present the common and the mundane as wonderful using the photographic quirks, accidents and faults of the past. The look of the analogue snapshot – a ...”

“... The debris can’t be reassembled after this. Eighty, ninety years from now, modules in history may well invoke Hollande’s failure to talk Brussels into a compromise on austerity in 2012. If they’re smart they’ll record his forced march to a supply-side recovery that failed because, unable to raise the deficit, he was obliged to lift money from the ...”

“... as singing and raw as anything in modernist painting. Here the conviction of Munch’s performance may sag, there it may sharpen: the quality follows no consistent arc. He comes across as a quickfire but resourceful workman, kept busy by his progressive-minded patrons. A 1917 portrait of a government lawyer slickly ...”

“... Interior, in which there is a figure – a maid – but she has her back to you. Why so few? It may just be that painters didn’t feel a picture without a figure was complete, but whatever the reason, the unpeopled room is a late subject. Unpeopled landscapes are rare too, but the tradition of outdoor sketching, as much note-taking as picture-making, goes ...”

“... so close. None of this was new to Abyei. It had all happened before. Exactly three years ago, in May 2008, Abyei the town was razed during an invasion from the North over the same issues. ‘The North does not want us, it wants our land,’ one Dinka sub-chief, Kuol Deng Maluak, had told me, not long before the town was occupied. His friends murmured ...”

“... kind of bird or fish or limpets’, or maybe fillet of walrus, though the seafood angle may be deceptive. Caliban’s promise to ‘get thee/ young seamews from the rock’ could equally well refer to a kill on the crags inland: i.e. chamois, via ‘scammel’, and thence to ‘seamew’. A high protein lunch in any event. Fitzpatrick, the editor of ...”

“... Each card is illuminated, if not exactly illustrated, by an installation, a display that may include garments, old and new, photographs, objects from the V&A and other collections, and things made for the exhibition: wax ‘casts’ of clothes, a grid of diamond-shaped cubby-holes that contain a glove and porcelain figurines of hunchbacks, a ...”

“... expression of both. If handwriting disappears, he warns, ‘some other elements of civilised life may die with this art, or skill, or habit.’ But maybe to focus on penmanship, as Hensher does, is to underestimate other clues about the arts of reading and writing that could help him identify the threat more clearly. If the aspiration to read is gradually ...”

“... might be. The inclusion of a few canvases sets up interesting tensions. George Frederic Watts may have been Cameron’s mentor in developing a modern heroic portraiture, yet when their respective visions of Tennyson’s daughter-in-law May Prinsep are set side by side, I find that his tremulous, scrawny brushwork sets ...”

“... to do with politics to be mild-mannered and level-headed, so when Paul Krugman came to London in May to promote his book End This Depression Now! (Norton, £14.99), even my landlord was impressed. Becoming a political pundit was never Krugman’s aspiration. You can tell he considers it slumming. His technocratic style suits American liberals’ idea of ...”

“... and asking it to turn maroon. We’d sooner rot. I sometimes feel as if I were rotting, though it may just be the lack of sun, the fact that I hear the automated voice on the Tube saying ‘Next station Camden Town’ in my dreams and that I’m constantly asked what I think of London. I’ve come around to saying, ‘It’s not love/hate, more like mild ...”

“... catalogue essays are strong on history and biography) is a question to return to.* Titles may explain subjects. They can also point to stylistic connections. Surreal titles turn up regularly: Woman Stabbed by the Sun Reciting Rocket Poems in the Geometrical Shapes of the Musical Bat Spittle Flight of the Sea (1939), while others like Burnt Canvas ...”