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“... and only achieve form when one steps back. Oddly favourite is a portrait of the (unappealing) Pope Paul III in a faded rose-coloured cape enthroned on a worn velvet chair, the supreme pontiff just a lay figure there to demonstrate the painter’s skill with his materials. Next to him the irresistible portrait of the ...”

“... impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s Cathedral, Londonderry, of Gráinne, daughter of Northern Ireland’s Education Minister Martin McGuinness (not yet knighted for his varied ...”

“... of their specialities. If I do not dwell on these – and they are as fascinating to the lay reader as any afterdinner conversation with a captive doctor – or on the equally absorbing chapters on epidemiology and on Scottish and American litigation, it is because they are in the end individual windows onto the courtroom, and it is in the courtroom ...”

“... interest which research into other people’s attitudes and behaviours holds for us). But in this lay the spur to utter opinions. Writers do not bother to set down views which they consider to be shared by most people in their society. Though it will often suit them, as a rhetorical ploy, to present their beliefs as if they commanded wide support, writers are ...”

“... 1796-7, did the civilisation of food come to power. This is the hypothesis of the historian Jean-Paul Aron, in a remarkable book called Le Mangeur du XIXe siècle.12 When the princes of the Ancien Régime set off into exile, they left behind them armies of chefs, sauciers and pâtissiers. These unemployed masters founded the Parisian restaurants which ...”

“... embraces his nihilist conclusions while failing to grasp the structured genealogy of concepts that lay behind it. ‘Concentrating on Nietzschian perspectivism, on truth as rhetorical value, Foucault would blind us to the truth both of Nietzsche’s and of his own rhetoric.’ Post-structuralism is deluded if it thinks to arrive at this position ...”

“... he could not write verse. This precluded him from any success in the theatre even if he did lay claim to having invented the three-act play. The parallel careers of Lope de Vega and Shakespeare eloquently demonstrate this bottom line of Golden Age aesthetics: ineffective playwrights turned experimental novelists did not get state funerals or build New ...”

“... which was at least predicated on dialogue and conversation. Adorno’s sometime collaborator Paul Lazarsfeld had the opposite worry: broadcasts may cause their listeners to feel informed about the world, and the listeners may mistake their new understanding for political action.Debates​ over the BBC’s formation, now a hundred years old, are not of ...”

“... and linguistic communities had fused together. Inextricable cross-fertilisation of influences lay at the root of what became Marxism. It is true that pompous obeisance has always been made to this, in terms of a supposed mingling of English political economy, French politics and German philosophy. But there was a local habitation and a name as well, and ...”

“... of this kind is not uncommon in the history of religious movements: Moses and Aaron, Jesus and St Paul, Sabbatai Sevi and Nathan of Gaza, are only a few of the joint religious leaderships that come to mind. (In an article in these pages, Perry Anderson has suggested that, at least in Latin American politics, the reverse is frequent, with the public leader ...”

“... explanations as well as his armband of Tokyo Metropolitan Office having satisfied them to lay full credit in his words, formed a circle around him . . . It should be said that the first detective’s account won’t necessarily come to the reader in quite the way this suggests, as pastiche and explication. Its relative clarity compared to other ...”

“... Jean and Pierre Troisgros. And it was betrayed, Steinberger says, by the media-savvy chef Paul Bocuse, wrongly identified as a leader of nouvelle cuisine. The new cuisine revolution needed its Trotsky, but what it got in Bocuse was its Stalin. What Bocuse did was to erode culinary creativity by taking its human source away from the stove. He ...”

“... the Chinese Embassy. Hu had planned to visit Zambia’s copper-producing region, where he was to lay the cornerstone of a new stadium financed by Beijing. Probably, at the last moment, his advisers realised he might face protests of a kind Chinese leaders have not faced at home since 1989, and have little idea how to handle. Hu cancelled his trip. The ...”

“... Camus was in charge of the paper’s literary pages, and one of the books he reviewed was Jean-Paul Sartre’s first novel, La Nausée. He immediately recognised that Sartre shared his own concern with the ‘absurdity of life’, but he was also impressed by Sartre’s suggestion that we are by nature ‘tellers of tales’, constantly transmuting our ...”

“... Unlike the runic folk outpourings of Bob Dylan, or the sophisticated musical meditations of Paul Simon, Springsteen’s rocking songs sounded a new reportorial note of decline and defiance. ‘To move forward, we’d have to willingly wear the weight of our unreconciled past. A day of personal and historical accountability had arrived,’ he says of the ...”