“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... besides being one of the most influential, novels of this century. Mr Hamilton simply takes it as read. All that he tells us is that it was originally written in German, that it was translated into English by Daphne Hardy, an English sculptress who was living with Koestler at the time, that she invented its English title, that it enjoyed a great success in ...”

“... from her notebook and pinning them to the beach with pebbles. It’s offered, and has duly been read, as a visual metaphor for an unspeakable loss – one of those moments when cinema aspires to the poetic. The film is full of such images: the blast of a Tube train and the mêlée of the platform stand in for Iris’s linguistic disorientation, her face ...”

“... the labour in addition to the other labours of my life’ – for ‘it would be necessary to read an infinity of novels.’ Such a wholesale reading of fiction takes on for many of us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and ...”

“... even more, say, than one of the great social pariahs of our own time, Jean Genet – an outlaw.’ Peter Robb is well aware that it was Caravaggio’s detractors – and chiefly the great theorist and critic Bellori – who associated the dark, dirt and violence of his character and deeds with the subjects and style of his paintings, but Robb’s book provides ...”

“... 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 ...”