“... 2012 and is represented by the mega-gallery David Zwirner. His napkin doodles, like Picasso’s, may be worth thousands.Dan Nadel researched his comprehensive biography with Crumb’s ‘permission and support’, and full access to his archives. His account of the Crumb family is fascinating. The middle child of five, Robert grew up in a volatile ...”

“... with geometric motifs and stylised beasts, its border woven with the Medici ball device. The rug may have been an actual Medici possession, an expensive import that Cosimo wanted to show off, but it also alludes to the recent rapprochement between the Eastern and Western churches. The composition is built around a central recession, with the saints arranged ...”

“... as C.S. Lewis and practised by such as Fr Martin Jarrett-Kerr, seemed interesting to others, who may thus have seemed, willy-nilly, to be crypto-Christians. One point of importance in this, as usual good, but as usual digressive, essay concerns Empson’s refusal to distinguish between the truth of poetry and the truth of science. He rejected the ...”

“... British manufactures out of some foreign markets. Industrial production in the UK contracted in May. At some point, it is believed, businesses will fail, throwing their workers onto the state, and the British public finances will disintegrate: a long period of prosperity will come to an end. Like all defensive alliances, the euro is also an act of ...”

“... fighting so far. In the course of the last few meetings the English had overcome whatever awe they may have had of the great Spanish array and this time they came in close, firing low at a hundred yards or less (the round-shot of the time was neither accurate nor very dangerous at over two hundred yards, but at one hundred, or as Winter of the Vanguard put it ...”

“... set in Britain and Two and Four in Italy. Within this oscillating progression, journeys abroad may involve returns (hence the first Italian poem is ‘There Again’), while thought is a continuous questing. Time modulates into spatial images that tangle and knot. Of his mother’s later life Robinson writes: Childless, as if you were once more. days ...”

“... to our present situation; it would yield the same conclusion at any point in human history. It may seem preposterous that such a conclusion could be reached by armchair reasoning from the mere fact of our being alive now. Yet it would be wrong to rush to judgment. The counter-intuitive nature of probability is itself a reason for caution; moreover, the ...”

“... officers found it especially hard to catch farm labourers in the Principality in 1914-15. ‘In May 1915 parties of troops distributed 30,000 recruiting leaflets at hiring fairs in Lleyn, for a net gain of 23 men; at another where 200 men were individually canvassed, ten recruits resulted.’ At this stage, people in Cumberland were also resistant. But when ...”

“... debate on evolution would show, anthropocentrism was still the prevailing outlook.’ We may now consider more specific side-effects of these shifts. First, pet-keeping. We are told that this ‘had been fashionable among the well-to-do in the Middle Ages’. About the rest of the population we have no evidence, but as soon as they become ...”

“... Mussulman manner, into the sea for infidelity, and avenged by a young Venetian, her lover’. It may be that Byron was in the nick of time to prevent a girl he had seduced from being dumped in the Aegean. The fineness of the poem does not depend on his exposure to the practice but on his deep sense of involvement with the principle. Fragment or no, ‘The ...”

“... buckle down to read imaginative books by dead authors. Undergraduates reading English at Cambridge may begin with an essay on Gawain and the Green Knight. At Oxford they tackle In Memoriam. O-Levellers could be confronting Romeo and Juliet and A-Levellers the poems of Herbert. The central question all of them ask of a work is what it means, and answering this ...”

“... but absolutely authentic difference between herself and the rest of the family), and it may be that art can no longer handle that basic material of the individual and the family. It is no longer thought of as ‘serious’ and ‘important’. (And yet was it ever seen as being so? Probably not.) Grossman replaces it with a pattern of arbitrary ...”

“... which he knows well instead of skipping round the world and across three millennia. It may be this diachronic range that makes Arabia ‘half empty’ on page 194 but endure ‘overcrowding’ by page 200. And as if to widen still further the range of conquest and imperialism, Kiernan takes women on board as having ‘a good claim to be classed as ...”

“... but Nelson Mandela’s, shamelessly plundered from James Meek’s essay in the LRB of 26 May. Thistlewood put it more bluntly: ‘Insurrection then became a public duty.’ He did not possess a particle of Mandela’s grace and generosity, but his argument was essentially the same. As the chief justice prepared to deliver the death ...”

“... the army, but between them is all the difference there is between an NCO and an officer – which may remind us of Gottfried Benn’s remark that during the Nazizeit joining the army was the only elegant form of ‘inner emigration’. So it was that long after the war an aristocratic Wehrmacht clung to the self-serving myth that the crimes and excesses of ...”