“... from Western civilisation, and made his journey appear more of an exploration of his own self.) We may accept that the details of Phat Diem or Santiago were observable by anyone who happened to be there, but venture to think that only one writer would have selected them and not others present in the scene, and described them in those words in that particular ...”

“... problem seriously. How he did so is well documented, first in an interview with him recorded on 27 May and published in the exhibition catalogue, secondly in a lecture given at the Tate on 1 October and published in the current issue of the Art Newspaper. I quote from the interview: The architecture as a whole is overblown, authoritarian and a bit ...”

“... take himself too seriously, and such excurses are mercifully brief, as is the book itself. ‘This may be the first short book on Napoleon,’ he comments (almost – Felix Markham’s classic 1954 Napoleon and the Awakening of Europe is even shorter). The problem is not that Martin occasionally loses himself in silliness, but that, like most of the ...”

“... after having talked for long enough about feminism, deconstruction and literary theory. The term may have been coined by Stephen Greenblatt in an essay of 1982; if so it was already a restrike, minted from a prototype used by Wesley Morris in 1972 or perhaps by Roy Harvey Pearce in 1958. Greenblatt himself came to prefer the term ‘cultural poetics’, but ...”

“... world dominated by power, against which prudence and a ready wit seem the best defence. He may have been working within a popular tradition, but La Fontaine confronts issues as grave as those raised by tragedy: there is more cruelty and death in his fables than in all the plays of Corneille and Racine. His insight into human drives and his meditation ...”

“... came under attack. Dress inevitably became an issue at the opening of the Estates General in May 1789, when the clergy arrived in their variously coloured robes, the members of the Third Estate in sober black and the nobles in a kaleidoscope of costumes; an early speech by Mirabeau challenged the pernicious distinctions this created. In August 1790 the ...”

“... never blush. Death is the focus of the blockbuster show at the National Portrait Gallery (until 27 May): these fleshy phantoms stand or recline in a universe of putrefaction. The individual canvases are stunning, but when you see them all together, a sense of spiritual plague comes off them like a dead-handed signature, reminiscent of the sun-blotting visions ...”

“... Council concerning Iraq’s mobile biological weapons laboratories was immediately criticised by David Kelly, who recognised them as trucks bought from Marconi for filling balloons with hydrogen. David Kelly and Brian Jones were not the only ones to have doubts about the dossier: similar doubts were expressed by nuclear ...”

“... accepted Boeing’s tender for a massive new cargo aircraft for the United States Air Force, David Lodge would not have been able to write Paradise News. Instead, however, Lockheed got the contract, and Boeing were left with a redundant set of blueprints for the biggest furniture van never built. To save all that development money going to waste, they ...”

“... lovely Ariane Deume, née Ariane Cassandre Corisande d’Auble, ‘very top-drawer in Geneva’ as David Coward nicely renders ‘ce qui se fait de mieux à Genève’. The two horses suggest Solal hopes to abduct the girl right now, but he has other tricks up his sleeve, in spite of his bare breast. He appears to be thinking of killing himself, and he dons an ...”

“... be, defamatory by a jury. To this uncertainty is added another: the cost. Who knows what damages may be awarded? Who knows at the start of a libel action what the lawyers’ bills will turn out to be? The Daily Mail defended a case against the Moonies. The paper had said that the church was in the habit of brainwashing its converts. When the first writ ...”

“... the teaching burden of thirty to forty hours a week which he had hitherto endured. But he was, David Boucher tells us, as intellectually isolated within his own university as he was from the broader philosophical currents represented by Russell. His chief influences came from quite elsewhere – notably, from the Italian idealists, Croce, Gentile and de ...”

“... After working​ on his film adaptation of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1991), David Cronenberg apotheosised both the writer and himself by claiming his screenwriting and Burroughs’s literary style had synergised. Cronenberg apparently mused that were Burroughs to die he might write his next novel. Burroughs expired in 1997, and although Cronenberg has directed many films since then – operas too – while dabbling in graphic novels and other writings, Consumed is his first full-length work of fiction ...”

“... spectacle it afforded: the almost physical manifestation of Trump’s deference to Putin. It may happen again, whether as a result of the volume of sabre-rattling or the onset of war with Iran; a decision to sack Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating meddling in the 2016 election; a shutdown of the federal government to extort funds ...”

“... is the reader. We stare at and listen voyeuristically to the life of a young professional man, David, living alone in rented South London rooms. Ridgway switches to a neutral register. The normal novelistic hierarchy of significance, in which everything noticed is important and everything unnoticed isn’t, ceases to apply. Which of our observations of ...”