“... Next time it will be different. Or so almost everyone in Scotland now believes, as they look forward to another election and back over the long trail of wreckage from 1979 to the present. The Conservative regime began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis ...”

“... who the culprit was, that he lived locally and that he was mentally-ill – and so was unlikely to be prosecuted. The policeman, a PC Sullivan, seems to have made the connection between Bartlett’s attacker and the elusive subject of an abortive Mental Health Assessment he had attended the week before. He later, rather unconvincingly, denied all this and ...”

“... portraits at the Tate. There are some superb pictures but, with the sitters shortly to die or be executed, many of them seem ominous or doom-laden. New to me and to R. is Antonis Mor, whose portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham looks like an Edwardian tinted photograph, and with the sitter so eerily present not entirely pleasing. All art is tiring and these ...”

“... laugh. It’s a rather wandering service with plenty of time to reflect that, as always, it will be the jokes one will most miss and how at the regular suppers we used to have at L’Etoile we always told each other the same stories. They were generally of Alan’s romantic escapades or of other people’s bad behaviour, a favourite being how, after a ...”

“... art. A sign explains that German Jews thought that they could become part of the dominant culture by embracing the ideals of Bildung – a belief formed by engagement with art, philosophy and learning – which this room embodies in the way a 17th-century Dutch interior displays order and cleanliness. The exhibit is ...”

“... and resourceful. To vary what Mallarmé says about himself (Lowell quotes it in his last book, Day by Day), here was someone who had the good fortune to find a style that made writing possible. By comparison with him, other poets don’t use language, don’t write about the world. For many years, the Collected Poems that ...”

“... to move south of the river to get them. When house prices began to go up, this area began to be colonised by bankers and City types. We were the last non-City people to move into the street where we live – the last of the aborigines. These days, as houses become an ever more critical capital asset, there is a ...”

“... looms, nature documentaries have become big business. The last six years have seen a succession of David Attenborough hits: Blue Planet II, Dynasties and Dynasties II, The Green Planet and Frozen Planet II on the BBC; and on Netflix, Our Planet, A Life on Our Planet and Planet Earth II. Attenborough’s most recent series, Wild Isles, was watched ...”

“... sweet touches of childish humour that you almost forget how creepy it is for a 14-year-old girl to be singing a love letter to a moustachioed man more than twice her age.Apparently, Gable was so moved by her performance that he kissed her, at which Garland burst into tears (Mickey Rooney, her teenage co-star and classmate in ...”

“... sympathetic biographer, Edward Luce. He slept on hard floors to feel the discomfort experienced by the less fortunate. In his high school yearbook photo, ‘the eye is drawn to his hawklike nose and piercing gaze,’ Luce writes, and despite his desire to feel what the poor feel, ‘there is a hauteur about him.’ The young Zbig was long on language ...”

“... to take some photographs outside recently, a man with a lanyard told us to stop. He wouldn’t be drawn on his employer: ‘It’s just a tech company.’ Two independent sources who have attended meetings there with senior Palantir staff in the last two years told us they had to sign non-disclosure agreements just to enter the building.Such wariness may ...”

“... minority.Many attempts have been made to explain relativity to non-scientists, among them several by Einstein himself, beginning with Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1916, first published in English in 1920). It is still in print today, though despite having had so many readers it has not succeeded in persuading the general public to abandon ...”

“... art, apparently; it takes an awful effort or a sudden jolt to make me alter facts. Shouldn’t it be a lobster town, and further on – where the bait, fish for bait, was trapped – (this is trivial, I know, and like Marianne [Moore], sometimes I think I’m telling the truth when I’m not) … ‘The sea drenched the rock’ is so perfectly simple and so ...”

“... Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation by aesthetic sub-tendencies such as maximalism and minimalism. Despite his professed indifference to the pro-con debate, however, McGurl also sets out to defend the creative writing programme from its detractors, assuming the rhetorical burden of proving that ...”

“... and unpublished work to Max Brod, along with the explicit instruction that the work should be destroyed on Kafka’s death. Indeed, Kafka had apparently already burned much of the work himself. Brod refused to honour the request, although he did not publish everything that was bequeathed to him. He published the novels The Trial, The Castle and Amerika ...”