“... socialists, and another about the Spanish Civil War that some reviewers praised but nobody read. Six hundred of the 1500 print-run for Homage to Catalonia were unsold when Orwell died in January 1950. Later fame has blurred the fact that few of his contemporaries regarded Orwell’s writing highly in the Thirties, or took his ideas seriously. And this ...”

“... 2000 that he or she start with Militant, to get properly into the mood. It is a compellingly good read, and what is more, as far as one can tell, a model of fair and unbiased reporting. The weightier volume, with its tables and statistics and psephological analyses, will be for the long days in the library that follow. It is sobering to realise that that ...”

“... and imperishable, which one might label “God”.’ This tilt makes the book a curious one to read for much of the time, at least for this reader, inclined to believe that the supposed deep question is not a question at all, but an imposing phantom cast up by certain habits of mind. Holt quotes plenty of people who feel this way; he knows that worrying ...”

“... limits of bourgeois morality, but The Accidental Woman is clearly the work of a young man who’s read Murphy, Watt and First Love. The allegiance to Beckett is chiefly signalled by a studied disdain for the conventions of realism (‘Here you are to imagine a short scene of family jubilation, I’m buggered if I can describe one’), along with some suitably ...”

“... having served eight years for brutally attacking her, somehow track her down? If you’ve ever read a novel, you know the answers. There’s no suspense here – it’s all about the how. Greta’s opinions are dependably unwoke. She quips that her dog’s fur has turned white from seeing ‘the souls of dead slaves’. She assumes that her landlady’s ...”

“... Criticism told us they should do so). But there is a Shakespearean dazzle as you hear the text, or read it in the first printed version, which of course had no apostrophe after ‘soldiers’: it seems for a moment as if ‘our soldiers’ are dropping as they fight, with the long slow swoop of a night-owl or the broken-legged swing of an idle thresher’s ...”

“... or title-page. Yet in addition to the Nazi threats of genocide which it quotes, Eliot would have read this: After covering about 5 kms the car ... stopped and we were told there was some engine trouble. We were ordered to leave the car and line up on the side of the road.     Suddenly we heard 4 shots in quick, succession, and crying and moaning. Then ...”

“... wall outside the show’s entrance, a copy of Slaughterhouse 5 is displayed in the first room, and Richard Peter’s photograph of a statue overlooking the firebombed cityscape of Dresden is on the front cover of the catalogue. All these authors explore the effects of conflict on the perception of time and, like photographers, play with the concatenation of ...”

“... each and tells us that ‘the raging sea boils.’ You could say that, and you could also say, as Richard Taylor does in his book on the film, that Eisenstein is showing us what moving pictures alone can do by way of representing reality, is remembering all the shifting, unfaked water in the work of the Lumière Brothers, for example. Or you could just watch ...”

“... reason dictates that they must be lying on the floor with the camera overhead, it is hard not to read it as if they were stapled halfway up a wall, straining to jump down. The Barbican’s capaciously enjoyable exhibition (until 14 February) hums with that same optimistic vitality. The Eameses’ many short films were, Charles said, ‘attempts to get across ...”

“... Steele, Prior), aristocrats (the Marquess of Rockingham, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu) and doctors (Richard Mead, Sir Hans Sloane). But he turned down an offer to be the King’s Painter because he objected to ‘the slavery of court dependence’. His writings on art were read widely (his Essay on the Theory of ...”

“... various hands, in particular Lord Burlington’s. Nearly all are plans and elevations, so to read them you must extract three-dimensional reality from two-dimensional projections. You can test your interpretive abilities by turning to the handsome modern models, in unpainted beech and limewood, which first came to London in 1975, when they were included ...”

“... altered as desired, as well as literary texts. The contributions poured in. There was a precedent: Richard Huelsenbeck had intended to publish a similar collection called Dadaco early in 1920. Some trial pages were printed but the project seems to have been abandoned on grounds of cost. The volume was first intended to be entitled Dadako, a term combining art ...”

“... third volume of Charles Moore’s Thatcher biography, and I would urge anybody who likes a bit of Richard II with their morning coffee to read the last two hundred pages straightaway. Thatcher’s downfall, we know, was a coup de théâtre if ever there was one, but the book is also very telling about the duplicity of ...”

“... a state secret; that Nixon ranted and raved and used foul language was known to everybody who read the newspapers. ‘Expletive deleted’ became a joke in its own right. I did not know – and was startled to read – that Moraji Desai, sometime Indian prime minister, was a CIA informant even while serving in Mrs ...”