“... was cosmetically altered to suit the needs of Rossetti’s patron, Frederick Richards Leyland.In John Collier’s Lilith (1887), the demon goddess is standing up, but her eyes are averted. There is none of the sense of threat posed by Kiki Smith’s sculpture. Here is a more demure Lilith, all milky skin and long, thick auburn hair. She wears nothing but a ...”

“... affect the outcomes of the pandemic are nothing to do with the policy choices made by leaders. As John Lanchester wrote in the LRB (16 December 2021), the UK population is older and more obese than that in many other countries, and we live in crowded cities and have an unequal society, all of which makes us, collectively, more susceptible to Covid-19. On the ...”

“... These measures will probably reappear in new legislation. Lord Walney (formerly the Labour MP John Woodcock, now a crossbench peer) claimed that the protest clauses in the Bill were ‘designed to protect the primacy of our democracy’. How odd, then, that they were not in the version put before the democratically elected Commons. Instead, the unelected ...”

“... Most of the Villains section would be devoted to American politicians. Jeane Kirkpatrick and John F. Kennedy are high up in this league, but the top place is rightly reserved for Henry Kissinger. One of the mysteries about international affairs is the state of this man’s reputation. In every continent of the world (except Australia) Kissinger created ...”

“... these sexual liberators, and the romanticising of an innately revolutionary gay sensibility, as in John Rechy’s Sexual Outlaw, but he sees radical possibilities in the ‘transgressive reinscription’ of such writers as Wilde, Genet or Orton, who undermine dominant structures of gender and class even as they appropriate and mimic them. Although he makes ...”

“... such authority on the moral ambitions it represented. This branch-to-branch search is centred on John Stuart Mill, Henry Fawcett and Leslie Stephen. He then traces the change in style and tone which came as the academic profession and the public service spread their tentacles. He discusses three legal theorists who epitomised this transition – Henry ...”

“... Douglas Adams (hitchhiking through a galaxy of fading stars), Woody Allen, Kingsley Amis, Anon, John Aubrey, Auden and Ayckbourn. An Auden parody is called ‘Self-Congratulatory Ode ...’, but it is the purr of mutual congratulation which is deafening. ‘Parody is frequently welcomed by its victims, who recognise it as a compliment, however ...”

“... terror of the future, filled with anger, spleen and guilt, aware of swiftly approaching death.’ John Gielgud played Daddy and survived – which was more than the picture did. A plot like that would sink a battleship. That’s your opinion. What about the others? The Night Porter was about one of the inmates of Dachau or possibly Belsen. She falls in love ...”

“... I’, declares a mysterious character in one of the short sketches that makes up this collection of fugitive pieces, ‘am a Traveller in Romance.’ It does not seem an apt title for Somerset Maugham, for apart from a passing whim to end his days at Angkor Wat, he strikes one as very little tinged with romance. He describes himself as ‘more inclined to look forward than to look back’, as having ‘always lived so much in the future’, and there was nothing romantic in the way he went about his writing ...”

“... to hide away. Franco takes the tiny chimpanzee home, supposedly for a day or two, but his father (John Lithgow), suffering badly from Alzheimer’s, is much drawn to the creature, who happily stays with the family. They call him Caesar, but that’s only because someone has been peeking at his future destiny as ape leader. Having discovered that the ...”

“... than Labour – they don’t have to fear accusations of defeatism and a lack of patriotism. John Major continued the trend in the 1990s even as the navy argued vigorously for two new fleet carriers to replace the three small Invincible-class ships.This was effected under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and, after many delays and much cost inflation, the ...”

“... the mirror, has an extraordinary pathos. All of the heads in the silver relief of the beheading of John the Baptist in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, which was not included in these exhibitions, are remarkable for their strong and varied expressions, especially the head of the executioner, which is well reproduced in the Washington catalogue ...”

“... assembly line, for example – were fictions. While Daisey is being reprimanded, a writer called John D’Agata has been promoting a book, Lifespan of a Fact (Norton, $17.95), about the way he changes or makes up the facts. D’Agata and David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010), are the leaders of a movement that believes the most ...”

“... sensation for the devotional reader on encountering a text written on parchment, with the words of John 1:14 – ‘And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ – thrumming in their ears. After the hair is removed, the skins are dried and stretched across a frame, known as a herse. The word comes from the French herse, meaning a harrow, and ultimately ...”