“... for the Venice Biennale on the forged metal sculptures of Chadwick, Armitage and Butler, Herbert Read wrote that they displayed the ‘geometry of fear’ and found allusions to snares, teeth and claws. In the wake of the atom bomb and revelations about the concentration camps, Read’s description helped to determine an ...”

“... According to​ Herbert Read, ‘the most revolutionary event in post-war British art’ was Victor Pasmore’s conversion from figurative to abstract painting. Victor Pasmore: Towards a New Reality at Pallant House in Chichester (until 11 June), examines that moment around 1948 and its place in Pasmore’s long career ...”

“... of decline periodisation has been one of the most influential, and provides the ground bass of Peter Brown’s memoir. It dates from the beginning of late antiquity, the period that Brown has done more than anyone to put on the historiographical map, and is owed to the prolific historian Cassius Dio, born of a senatorial family and thus into the Roman ...”

“... sublime art to the categories of sweetness and light, as well as against the Marxist tendency to read poetry in terms that take only passing account of the individual will. Bloom emphasises both the determining context and the power that some rare individuals have of breaking (at least part way) out of it. Anyone who wants to ...”

“... into absurdity when events become too nauseous to be taken seriously. There are passages that read like a parody of such long, morbid, humourless para-political thrillers of espionage as Monimbo (copyright Mossgrave Partnership) or Charles McCarry’s The Last Supper – so ambitiously titled but with all the human interest of a computer or a ...”

“... in the Cold War … is hard to imagine.’There​ are other ways of telling the story. To turn to Peter Reddaway’s memoir of his work with the dissidents is to move not only in time – his story starts in the 1960s and runs through to 1991 – but also to another emotional register, one of high idealism on the part of altruistic Westerners. To be sure, the ...”

“... with his discovery – or was it entombment? – by Sartre. It is recorded that when Genet first read Saint Genet, he was cast into deep despair, an emotion shared by many others who have tried to read Sartre’s massive study. But being a practical man he was not one to reject attention. What is extraordinary about ...”

“... aching, bitter, helpless need’ (‘Manifesto’) is deliberately embarrassing to read, because as Lawrence’s criticism of mechanised relationships developed through the war years, he came to think of neutrality as sinister. Metrical verse would have kept the topic and the reader at too safe a distance; the poems are tuned instead to pick up ...”

“... some taken by people like Humphrey Spender and Bill Brandt who went to the North because they had read Priestley’s book – which illustrate the text with astonishing exactness. Yet the photographs of the unemployed, of slate-scaled terraces of back-to-backs snaking under slate-grey skies – grainy sooty pictures of gritty sooty surfaces – have earned a ...”

“... he is still at it, painting in the yard and suffering from cold, on the 12th and 15th. Later we read: ‘All day spent placing the shawl on the lay figure’ and of 40 hours pencilling in the pattern of the shawl. Snow stops work on the tarpaulin, the lay figure is out in the yard sitting ‘like a Guy’. Rossetti has borrowed his great coat and a pair of ...”

“... of modern pigs show animals which at least are not a burden to themselves. If pigs could read they would be encouraged by Wiseman’s suggestion that outdoor systems may prove to have advantages over intensive piggeries, and interested to find that studies in Edinburgh into alternative methods of pig-raising which ‘allow the animals to express ...”

“... sense of the world as a closed circle of violence and power. A young woman and a boy, Julie and Peter, attacked by mysterious assailants, have to run for their lives: a classic noir plot (a lover of jazz, Manchette likes to riff on the standards). He switches pace between scenes, speeding up the action until it’s a surreal blur or suspending it, leaving ...”

“... permitted to cremate themselves. This had enabled him to get the whole thing off tax.’ When I read Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda it seemed to me Carey had begun with an ambitious concluding image – the glass church floating down the Bellinger River – and worked backwards to contrive it. I have the same uneasy feeling about this novel: that ...”

“... life, most of them rare visitors except for Joan Rodker, in whose flat Doris had lived with Peter, her four-year-old son, while they organised demonstrations and international ‘peace’ meetings. If anyone asked later if she’d been a member of the Communist Party, Doris would give a deep sigh at having to tell it yet again, and explain she was never ...”

“... would decide whether to authorise publication or not, as he saw fit. In any case, he would have read them all himself. Once in France, Swinton was alarmed by German superiority in artillery: If our resourceful, industrious and well-equipped opponents were able to accomplish so much in haste and with improvised means, what might they not do, given ...”