“... of two important endings. One was familial. Sister Maureen Clare – my late husband Stuart Hall’s cousin and his last living relative on the island – was gravely ill. For decades, Clare had given us a home in Kingston. The other related to my work as a historian. I had recently finished a book on Edward Long, slaveowner and author of the celebrated ...”

“... I did in my simultaneously published life of Spender, but where I trod, Parker has dug. He makes no extravagant claim for Isherwood’s writing, praising only, in his extensive descriptions of the work, the Berlin stories, the novel A Single Man, and the polemical autobiography Christopher and His Kind. He examines the writing for film, but thinks it ...”

“... Immendorff: Art Belongs to the People! (until 31 August) selected by Norman Rosenthal from the Hall Art Foundation in Vermont, shows how Immendorff remained in artistic dialogue with his former teacher throughout his life. For his students Beuys was a model of the total commitment, asceticism and seriousness required to be a true artist, down to the ...”

“... man which we all recognise, and from which we suffer ourselves. The Svevan ordinary man belongs to no recognisable social category. Neither has he any traditional literary status: he is not a ‘little man’; there is no one quite like him in Jane Austen or in Trollope, Flaubert or Proust. Neither is there anyone quite like ...”

“... to do with his roots in the popular music of pre-war England, particularly his interest in music hall and the musical comedy of Edwardian London. The fascination with music hall is the most palpable link between Grainger and the Kipling of the Barrack-Room Ballads, the Cockney dialect and heavy speech rhythms of which ...”

“... entwined.           Our neighbour                           John who spends his free time diving plumbing the sea for evidence and spilt cargoes         who has burrowed in the mud to touch the mystery of something absolute         can tell you how                         out in the ...”

“... A good many years ago the late Sir John Masterman, when Provost of Worcester College, had the idea of creating a species of Sherlock Holmes Apocrypha. He wrote two or three short stories which appeared, I think, in an evening newspaper. I myself can recall nothing of them except a little joke. In the course of investigating a case of poisoning ...”

“... was scheduled to give another talk on contemporary Irish politics in a small suburb of Boston. The hall was jammed, and suitably garnished with cops and clerics. My lecture was not the only item on the agenda, but it was the finale. It was immediately preceded by ‘Mother Machree’, sung with a passion and a longing that would have seemed de trop even in a ...”

“... John Stuart Mill​ approved of dissent. In ‘On Liberty’, he argued that vigorous debate improved society and that unconventional behaviour lit the path to freer and more fulfilling lives. He urged the widest tolerance for opinion, speech and even what he charmingly called ‘experiments of living’. Without such pinpricks, he argued, like-minded majorities would grow intolerant and democracies would slide into despotism ...”

“... Body. The serial stuff-strutters include the photo-artists Gilbert & George, Cindy Sherman and John Coplans; the sculptors Jeff Koons, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn; the painters Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville; the performance and video artists Joseph Beuys, Rebecca Horn, Bruce Nauman, Arnulf Rainer and Matthew Barney. Their work commonly ...”

“... of these critics, but the realisation that writers like Conrad and Kipling, or Jane Austen and John Stuart Mill, thought and wrote without the natives in mind as an audience. An Indian or Jamaican woman reading Kim or Jane Eyre was able to bring to light the usually unstated colonial and male-dominated ideological assumptions behind the form of the novel ...”

“... the Bard. To get the ambience right, I fill a pewter mug with ale. A taper winks in the timbered hall. Even so, the poem seems very bad. Intoned, it sounds banal; sung, it simply upsets the cat. Something goes wrong in stanza two. Either the piece runs into sand, or the illusion slips, but I can never reach Suspicious doubt, O keep out, For thou art my ...”

“... oil painting by the American artist Nicole Eisenman, shows a group of figures sitting in City Hall Park in New York. They are part of the 2020 protest to defund the New York Police Department in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Eisenman herself appears twice in the scene – as a sleeping form on the left of the picture and on the right with her ...”

“... and a date: 1633. This was the year a local gentleman, Sir John Reresby of Thrybergh Hall, began to note the contents of his garden. Every peach, pear and plum is catalogued, as are herbs, shrubs, bulbs – ‘Kentish Codlings’, ‘the Granado Gilliflower’, ‘Melincholly Munkes ...”

“... Hendrick Avercamp (1585-1634): A Standing Man Watching a Skating Boy No doubt, in a year or two, this child will be gone; rumours of war in the air and boys at that age always impatient for something. The wide road that leads to the pond runs all the way out to the press gang – you can almost taste the glare of blood, the panic in the ranks, the dead laid out in seams of fire or lye (thus have they loved to wander; they have not refrained their feet); but, for now, he is safe; and the father admits to a moment of guarded pride, which is never quite free of misgiving (look at how close he stands to where the boy is balanced on his skates, a kind of beauty in the act of concentration ...”