“... Tory venom. It’s worth considering what kind of cultural authority this type of writing can lay claim to these days. It self-consciously repudiates the credentials of academic scholarship; it disparages the narrow technical expertise of the policy wonk; it cannot rest on the standing of achievement as a politician or novelist. In other words, it has ...”

“... she goes to her window: She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving – perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the ...”

“... to an invisible art manifestation: Lost Memories by Emma Matthews. ‘Very elegant, very Paul Klee,’ the punters say. Rusting English metal, from somewhere down the A13, near Rainham Marshes, rendered as a grid of delicately balanced reds and pinks, with just enough green to cancel the headache. This, so often, is how it works; synergy, they call ...”

“... airport, but that it was nonetheless clear to him that the root of the country’s violence lay in social injustice. This is a common view (and has nothing to do with the airport) but it is increasingly being called into question. In a recent article, Paul Collier, the director of Development Research at the World ...”

“... Spring ends with the miracle of a river gushing from the place where the murdered girl’s body lay, while Breaking the Waves culminates in the miracle of celestial bells, ringing out for the innocence of Bess. Yet in Bergman’s film, sexual assault and murder take place in a single scene; in Breaking the Waves Bess offers herself up time and time ...”

“... taboo’. In his essay on Knight, Michael Taylor quotes the critic on the political theology that lay behind his poses – the thought that ‘the religious importance of literature’ should be proclaimed ‘in a voice of authority’ – and concludes that this phrase can be used to ‘sum up the direction and impact’ of his work. Knight’s entrée into ...”

“... liberal institutions’? This would only happen if the pope agreed to make concessions. But herein lay the problem: Pius’s commitment to reform had always been tightly circumscribed and the trauma of his flight into exile had hardened his politics and his personality. With extraordinary stubbornness he insisted that his restoration must be a restoration in ...”

“... forward by Southern senators in the lead-up to the Civil War. They believed the American future lay in alliances with the slave states of Cuba and Brazil. Only by ending the slave trade, thereby insulating themselves against British ambitions, could ideal slave societies flourish. These societies would reproduce slaves from the existing ...”

“... bombs on students ‘returning home at night in evening dress’), was the ‘little band’ of Paul Nizan, René Maheu and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre was rumoured to be ‘the worst of the lot’.Beauvoir was preparing for her exams, full of love for Zaza, constantly addressing herself in her diary to the absent Jacques ...”

“... yet have a particular meaning. For some reason not yet clear to me, I noted down the names of Paul Ives, Graham Paine (‘who lost his life by drowning’), Clifford John Dunn, Ronald Alexander Pinn and John Hill, all of whom were born in the 1960s, as I was, and died early.The practice of using dead children’s identities began in the Metropolitan ...”

“... the completely unprecedented boom, which started as early as 1945 and lasted till at least 1967, lay rather in the steady rise of popular earnings in this period, against a background of long-pent-up unsatisfied demand. This model of growth, in turn, was sustained by new arrangements between states, whose ‘pursuit of narrow self-interest’ led both to ...”

“... is also shaped, inescapably, by our collective awareness of centuries of racist visual polemic. Lay and expert viewers of varied backgrounds have instinctively worried that the portrayal of Williams might fit into the long tradition of Western image-making that denigrates Black bodies for white entertainment. In 2018, when the painting was included in a ...”

“... a finer nuance of meaning. In their excellent compilation, The Jew in the Modern World (1980), Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz point out that the term’s origin is theological. More specifically, it ‘derives from the Septuagint, the Jewish translation of the Hebrew Scripture into Greek from the third century BC, in which holokaustos (“totally ...”

“... Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into hysterical denunciations of prolixity), the Report is a model of clarity. Its narrative is compelling and its conclusions stark in their ...”

“... intellectuals than with Hollywood. 21 February. Snow arrives on cue around four but alas doesn’t lay; ‘It’s laying!’ one of the joyous cries of childhood. 22 February. To the private view of the Caravaggio at the National Gallery. Crowded, but because only the paintings are lit and not the rooms the crowds melt into the gloom, or form a frieze of ...”