“... well as the non-hierarchical mode of composition that each devised. Mondrian strove to give equal weight to each element in his paintings while maintaining a unified whole, and so, in his way, did Newman; perhaps he insisted on their differences because they were close in this and other respects. In a sense theirs are ‘leaderless’ (an-arkhos) canvases ...”

“... colony. We have a programme and a list of guests. Jeremy Treglown is there, but where are Richard Gere and Bernardo Bertolucci? Where is Kurt Vonnegut? The bus sizzles along wet roads flanked by blackened chunks of Kendal Mint Cake and we debuss at the tiny Peredelkino church, where a service for Pasternak is to be held. The choir has not yet arrived ...”

“... by German botanists in Cameroon, its fruit yielded a much higher percentage of oil (50 per cent by weight compared to 15 per cent for the dura oil palms favoured in Africa). Oil palm plantations spread across Malaya and Sumatra in the 1920s, but the truly colossal growth began in the 1970s, first in Malaysia and then in Indonesia. In 1970, a hundred thousand ...”

“... and the cheap conceits, untying the absurd antitheses, toning down the gaudy lexicon, adding weight to the petty rhythms, painting everything white. The replacement of the early histories by ones written centuries after the events was not so much an exercise in historiographical recension as an act of translation. At all costs, Great Alexander had to be ...”

“... had asked Lévy to fix Juliet up with an English publisher, and believed he had written to Richard Bentley & Sons about the matter, no such letter from Paris survives in the Bentley archives (perhaps because Lévy objected to the idea and declined to act on it). The manuscript was lost, and so – more or less – was Juliet Herbert, until her ...”

“... of his personality, the orderly force of his background, the keenness of his ambition, his moral weight and shape: it might require a novelist like Dreiser to play with the psychic arithmetic which had brought the Massachusetts politician to this pretty pass. Kerry was a young man whose leadership instincts were so apparent at Yale that his friends used to ...”

“... approving of Charles, especially in the early years of his reign; and Johnson gives insufficient weight to the fact that panegyric was then a flourishing mode. Still, after the notably measured praise of the Heroic Stanzas in memory of Cromwell, Dryden does seem to have given himself over to acclaiming and defending the Stuart monarchs with a readiness that ...”

“... so tight, that hurt so in the pit of my stomach, was vanquished in the straining against her, the weight of her body on top of mine, the caress of her mouth and her hands.’ Now she is able to rebuke society from personal experience. Bisexuality, not heterosexuality, is the truth of the individual: it is ‘an honest rejection of the – yes – perversion ...”

“... cultural revival. Georgians were making stupendous films; the Rustaveli Theatre’s production of Richard III pulverised Edinburgh audiences who understood not a word of the language. The nation was rediscovering its past, and falling in love with what it discovered. One favourite anecdote told of a senior Georgian Communist who was expelled from the party ...”

“... and after 1914, and his sympathies for the abortive revolution of 1918-19: but he also gives full weight to the poet’s deep ‘Austrian’ distaste for everything ‘typically German’, especially for public life in the early days of the Weimar Republic. We read of Rilke’s admiration for T.G. Masaryk, the founder-president of Czechoslovakia, whose ...”

“... us: as he writes in Book 1 of My Struggle, ‘why should you live in a world without feeling its weight?’ If someone scans an item at a till, someone else must pay for it. If someone drinks coffee, they must later wash the cup. When Knausgaard mentions an off-ramp, he must actually merge into traffic: if he doesn’t inform us when he shifts into first, he ...”

“... her to the attention of the editors at Partisan Review, who began publishing her criticism: Richard Wright, Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds ...”

“... it just as forcefully. How could he consistently associate himself with Russophobes such as Richard Pipes, who want us to believe that Russians have authoritarianism stitched into their genetic code? Deep contextual insight is ostensibly what leads Cohen to dismiss foreign blueprints and game plans. Russia should develop ‘an indigenous economic ...”

“... about the ‘ineptitude of the governing statute’ – to borrow a phrase from the article by Richard Buxton QC which we cited in the Report. Some of us were very attracted to the Scottish regime, in which a single broad ground gives the Court of Appeal sufficient flexibility to quash any conviction where it believes that there was or might have been a ...”

“... the Syrian capital into an Occidental artefact. Oriental structures, struggling under the weight of satellite receivers large enough for families to sleep in, survive on sufferance. Most stand in a state of near destruction, a wall down here, doors falling from hinges there, prisoners shaved for execution. Posterity can lay the blame on Syria’s ...”