“... No ordinary and direct methods of inquiry would ever reveal them. But which are they, one may ask – discovery or invention? I think that in the nature of the case we have no means of telling, and we may justifiably doubt whether this dichotomy is applicable here. The material from free association and dream ...”

“... Cromwell gets 21 lines to himself plus a separate entry under Tudor Revolution in Government. This may indicate the administrative path to editorial favour, for A.V. Dicey’s academic writings on the 19th century state are rewarded with an entry of nine lines, the same as Lord John Russell who was merely in office at the time. This is three lines less than ...”

“... In this collection of essays, he explains his choice. He got off a train at the Gare d’Orsay in May 1945, with others from the German camps, to discover that virtually no one he had known in 1939, including his family, was still alive. He wanted to come to terms with that experience and with what had led to it. He worked for a while to rehabilitate ...”

“... political nationalism north of the Border, then the general election which followed it in May was surely the Culloden. The strident Scottish pibroch which had been played into British politics for ten years was suddenly overwhelmed by the resonance of Margaret Thatcher’s almost-Elizabethan and essentially Home Counties view of resurgent British ...”

“... cool tones and deep blacks, are the work of a mature artist. The Barbican retrospective (until 11 May) opens with a group of works made in 2007-8, a few years after Davis arrived in Los Angeles from New York, where he had cut short his studies at the Cooper Union, frustrated by the emphasis on conceptual training over painting as process. ‘I left school ...”

“... four 20th-century Chilean women convicted of murder, interrogating the way gender and class bias may have provoked their crimes and later shaped their public images. Her first novel, La Resta (2015, translated as The Remainder in 2018), involved a quest for the missing body of a dead mother through a Santiago in the throes of dictatorship and overflowing ...”

“... Sultana, isn’t clear. Sultana is thought to have been killed in an air strike in 2016; Abase may also be dead.) Begum told the Times that she wanted to return to the UK to have her baby, but the government decided to make this im­pos­sible by stripping her of her cit­izenship. Amendments to the 1981 British Nationality Act give the home secretary ...”

“... preferred smoke. The first room of Lacan: L’Exposition at the Pompidou-Metz (until 27 May), an extensive show dedicated to Lacan’s legacy in the visual arts, includes some captivating film of his infamous séminaires. Owlish behind spectacles, his leonine mane swept back, Lacan speaks in expressive, measured tones, a gnarled culebra, long gone ...”

“... affairs generally, is to be compared with yachting, and not with captaincy of a steamboat, which may be set on a fixed course to its destination and does not need to tack and change course abruptly. The destination in politics is always the same: the enduring safety and strength of the domain which is one’s own, whether principate or republic. The ...”

“... men and women report on what one of them calls their ‘stations in life’. Some of what they say may be most revealing about what people remember and what they are prepared to say to interviewers – unhappiness tends to be disclaimed and mothers praised – and the characteristic intimacies of memoir-writing are notably absent: no one recalls their own ...”

“... looking at the country. When one does look, as Fanny Eden does, the only honest initial response may be of puzzlement, a puzzlement which, if expressed wittily and intelligently, as it is here, can be more illuminating than certainties and absolute conclusions. Fanny Eden – sister of the novelist and writer about India, Emily – travelled to the Rajmahal ...”

“... behaving as you do. It can be put down in few enough words, however far-reaching its implications may be. My belief is that you are experimenting with us. It must be so. No other explanation has any real plausibility. Look at what you do. You pick me up, you put me down, you make me turn left, turn right, turn left again, and then you reward me with a morsel ...”

“... that one can’t hope to tell the truth in an autobiography, that the very desire to write one may be proof of an incapacity to do so veraciously. In any case there is likely to be a conflict between the writer’s wish to make sense of his or her life, and the need to cut, however modestly, a figure of interest to readers. Only people stupid and ...”

“... that Egypt and its people have provided for the past several centuries. Palestinians or Iraqis may level damaging political accusations at Egypt’s governments, but they never fail to acknowledge the country’s charm and the pleasures of its clipped, lilting dialect. In all that Tahia stood quite alone, and not altogether despite her flaws and often ...”

“... daughter. More alarming, the characters do not react realistically to dramatic events. Nilofer may no longer be in love with her first husband, Dmitri, but when he is murdered, you would expect her to feel horror or pity – or at least guilt at her own lack of feeling – but she has recovered her poise within a few paragraphs. When a spy is discovered at ...”