“... the helicopter that would take her back to Berlin was it evident that this was a politician of more than local standing. No mention had been made of the coming election, much less any challenger. When the German media complains that Merkel doesn’t bother to campaign, she makes a face, as if to say: ‘Why would I?’The centre isn’t merely holding in ...”

“... Norfolk and Norwich Hospital ‘in a state of almost total immobility’. We might like to know more about his condition (the reference to Gregor Samsa and his little legs doesn’t help much), its diagnosis and how it was treated. But Sebald prefers to let other people, other events and objects, speak for him. An exquisite sound picture of two night nurses ...”

“... The​ posthumous progress in English of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is marked by deaths: those of his majoritarian and minoritarian translators David McLintock and Ewald Osers, in 2003 and 2011 respectively; and in 2015 that of Carol Brown Janeway, his publisher at Knopf, his unlikely champion over decades (because, for all his influence and cultishness, Bernhard in English never exactly sold), and the translator herself of the posthumous My Prizes, in an exquisitely bound volume from Notting Hill Editions, with a justly amused introduction by Frances Wilson: ‘Few writers have received more applause than Thomas Bernhard, Austrian novelist, playwright and enfant terrible, and few have bitten more sharply the hand that clapped ...”

“... family betrayal: at first of the inheritance of the broad-church Anglicanism of his famous father, Thomas Arnold; and then – not once, but twice – in the danger to his marriage to Julia, the anti-Catholic he had married in New Zealand. Bernard Bergonzi’s description of Thomas Arnold the Younger as a ‘Victorian ...”

“... give it to the museums on the chin’) – irresistible to those who like me, twenty years and more ago, had heard Cuban schoolgirls shouting to the same measure: Fidel, Fidel, a los Yanquis darle duro. A month later, there was another, smaller parade, organised by some of the country’s leading artists in Santo Domingo square, demonstrating in favour of ...”

“... in an anonymous town somewhere in America, is also endlessly distracted from the game by the even more intractable problems of the rest of his life: his dead-end job manning the phones at a third-rate pizza joint, his shaky relationship with his girlfriend, the antics of his unstable friends. All this mundane, irrelevant stuff makes its way into the ...”

“... Ihave​ a theory – more of a hunch, really – that to be a real football fan you have to commit to a team by the age of six, or eight at the latest. Unlike my friends whose fathers took them to watch Aldershot’s Fourth Division tussles on Saturday afternoons, I don’t remember watching a football match before the 1986 Mexico World Cup, when I was already nine and a half ...”

“... biographies of his pictorial style. Charles Hope’s book, although in scope and ambition much more restricted than Crowe’s and Cavalcaselle’s, marks in this respect a most welcome change. It is the first truly informative account of Titian’s life published in English in recent years, based as it is on the author’s vast knowledge of previously ...”

“... through these palaces, staring at the gold cups and the silver bowls, which are not even used any more. Then they go to a sort of market inside the palace and buy pictures of these things, or miniature versions of them that are not real silver and gold.’ These criticisms are too laboured and sneering to have much force. I assume they are intended to reveal ...”

“... constitution came into force in January 1948. The Movimento Sociale Italiano had been established more than a year earlier under the leadership of Giorgio Almirante, Mussolini’s culture minister in the Nazi puppet state established in northern Italy in September 1943. By the end of the 1950s, the anti-fascist consensus of the immediate postwar period had ...”

“... a job and who is not. Those who make fortunes, men whose profits the state depends on, will have more than one vote: tycoons will have as many as nine. ‘Hello, I am H.L. Hunt,’ he would introduce himself. ‘I’m the richest man in the world.’ In the 1950s that wasn’t far from the truth, but because Hunt flew economy, parked his car five hundred ...”

“... and failed to form a government with Beppe Grillo’s Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S), which had won more votes than the PD alone but fewer than the centre-left coalition as a whole. He then tried and failed – not least because of manoeuvring by Renzi, who had lost heavily to Bersani in a primary to determine the leader of the coalition – to persuade ...”

“... or even Vermeer-forging, sense. Some gentlemanly code of ethics enfolds the activities of Thomas Wise and his fellows. As for purely literary, as opposed to bibliographical forgery, it receives no censure at all. Indeed, it receives rather high esteem. James Crossley, the distinguished 19th-century antiquarian and bibliographer, plumed himself on ...”

“... of the Tudor period is also largely vanished, swept away in those ‘great alterations’, or for more mundane reasons: eaten by mice; burned in accidental fires; discarded due to wear or changes in fashion. The same peaks and troughs of fortune that affected people changed objects. Eustace Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador to England, recorded in 1529 that he ...”

“... Thomas Mann’s​ most noteworthy appearance in Irish letters until now came in one of the last poems of W.B. Yeats. In the spring of 1938 the poet read a piece in the Yale Review by Archibald MacLeish, the only article on his work ‘which has not bored me for years’ – a disarming piece of Yeatsian egotism since most of the article was not about him ...”