“... and fiction which appeared after about 1928 (Remarque, Sassoon, Edmund Blunden among many others) may have sobered the memorial designers. God also retreats several paces from the iconography, although the graves of the unidentified dead are still marked ‘Known to God’ and the families still write: ‘May God protect ...”

“... Some drawings, made as ends in themselves, can be called ‘presentation drawings’, others may have been made as part of a painter’s education. Some seem to have no purpose other than to please the maker. In Leonardo’s red chalk profiles of an old and a young man, young beauty and crumpled age are so well represented in the young man’s ringlets ...”

“... straight. When Brigitte Bardot, as the sulky beautiful wife of Michel Piccoli, the writer who may or may not work on the film within the film, tells her husband she despises him, cueing us in to our title, we realise she has found the word she has been looking for during the last 45 minutes of film. A good word, and ...”

“... cuneiform literature is, currently, in favour. I suspect that Middle Egyptian hieroglyphics may be next, but there is no knowing. Anyway, I decided to chance it and go for Sebald. I ordered Die Ausgewanderten because Johannes sometimes talks of himself as an emigrant, or even an exile (which irritates me). Then, abandoning the pretence that this was a ...”

“... We are cheering for them, but the cheering does drown out quite a lot of other noises. ‘Viewers may ask,’ David Denby says in his very good review of this film in the New Yorker, ‘why it’s supposed to be better that hundreds, maybe thousands, of people in Harlem were destroyed by black gangsters rather than by Italians.’ And along the same lines we ...”

“... sold £459 million worth of postwar and contemporary art in the first half of last year. In May, Sotheby’s in New York more than doubled the record price for a contemporary work when it sold Rothko’s White Centre (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) for $72.8 million; the following night, at Christie’s, Warhol’s Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car ...”

“... which have landed them in a not altogether desirable situation, there is some awareness that they may have fallen into al-Qaida’s trap by playing its game of regime change. US hawks and others complain that Spanish voters acted cravenly in punishing their government merely for putting its citizens in harm’s way. But that isn’t what they did. They ...”

“... the structure of the genome . . . and how individual genes interact with other genes, or may seem to be silent, or we don’t really know what they do, or sometimes there are repetitions that are not clear to us, and it struck me as an interesting idea to try to organise the novel in that way’. The result is a confused mess, which ...”

“... Whatever else it may be, Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (now available on DVD from Artificial Eye) does not resemble the afternoon bill at the old Plaza or the new Cineplex. He first thought of creating a history of cinema in 1978. It would be told, he said, ‘archaeologically and biologically’. In spite of the metaphors, the plan seemed conventional enough: an account of movements and techniques, of changes of ‘cultural terrain ...”

“... ways of reading people through signs, physical gestures and expressions stay the same. That may be the reason strong bodily gestures play such a big part in Kaminsky’s poems – dancing, kissing on the floor ‘among the peels of lemons’ – and why he often emphasises the physicality of communication: ‘In Odessa, language always involved gestures ...”

“... by French scholars between 1920 and 1970, at Prehistomania at the Musée de l’Homme (until 20 May).Paris has seen a lot of ‘prehistomania’ in recent years. In 2018, the Musée de l’Homme put on a popular Neanderthal exhibition. The following year, at the Centre Pompidou, Prehistory: A Modern Enigma considered 19th and 20th-century artistic responses ...”

“... survived the Famine; many, indeed, improved their prospects as a result of it, and this legacy may be more difficult for us to deal with in Ireland now than the legacy of those who died or emigrated.The trustees of Lord Portsmouth are mentioned in the centenary brochure as subscribing to the cathedral fund. The following sentence is added: ‘Later, in the ...”

“... over Maastricht without ever recovering politically, Major finally got ratification through in May 1993, a couple of days after the Danes were forced into holding a second referendum. At the Treasury, Kenneth Clarke presided over a return to growth, but it was of no electoral avail. The Conservatives were comprehensively thrashed in the elections of ...”

“... predatory culture vultures. In my own case – it’s true – certain vile French diphthongs may be part of the problem: the phonetic distinctions between Cahun, Caen, Caïn, Cannes, Cohn, canne, cane, cagne, camp, cône and con remain, sadly, a perpetual trial. Yet it’s also undeniable: though one of the most extraordinary personalities associated ...”