“... banns, cemetery and baptismal registers – these interconnections amount to evidence of what Mark Ponte, whose archival work has brought them to light, calls an Afro-Atlantic community in 17th-century Amsterdam, established in the eastern part of the city in the area around the Jodenbreestraat. Sephardic Jews fleeing persecution in Portugal and Spain had ...”

“... frame and the musician’s satin skirts. But the flat planes are immutable blocks of tone and no mark suggests that their outlines could alter. What are we to know of the objects to which they belong? Only their interactions with light.This – cool, bemusing, faintly sardonic – is extreme Vermeer, an artist embracing his own waywardness. Scholars have ...”

“... political advice. Akbar Jehan was the daughter of Harry Nedous, an Austro-Swiss hotelier, and Mir Jan, a Kashmiri milkmaid. The Nedous family had arrived in India at the turn of the last century and invested their savings in the majestic Nedous Hotel in Lahore – later there were hotels in Srinagar and Poona. Harry Nedous was the businessman; his ...”

“... Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this ...”

“... put a premium on managerial ingenuity. House rents and food, on the other hand, were costly; and Jan den Tex’s Oldenbarnevelt brings out the fact that taxation was tailored, as in all well-regulated states, to fall disproportionately on the poor. It may be regretted that Israel does not tell us more about labour conditions – for example, in the vast ...”

“... lines of predilection. Sappho gets in, but not Patience Strong; ‘John’ Radclyffe Hall, but not Jan Morris; Julia Kristeva, but not Elizabeth David (nor Jane Grigson, nor even Mrs Beeton – writing about cooking does not rate high). Betty Friedan gets in, but not Mary Douglas; Hannah Arendt, but not Barbara Wootton. In general, journalists get a raw ...”

“... they deplored the low levels attained in most classical schools. Educational reformers such as Jan Amos Comenius and Enlightenment thinkers such as Helvétius held that schools based on drudgery and dead languages could have no other results. The professionals, for their part, insisted – generation after generation – that once upon a time, things had ...”

“... come in for slagging.) Yet we also hear that many artists Hughes admires couldn’t draw well. Mark Rothko has ‘severe limitations as a draughts man’, as does Milton Avery; David Smith is ‘very uneven’, Magritte straightforwardly poor. Hughes’s tendency to argue both sides achieves poignancy in his famous, and well-deserved, attack on Julian ...”

“... immense middle road laid out by the Dutch in the 17th century. When he first saw the canvases of Jan van Goyen, he tells us,I felt I had waited an age for just this painter, that he filled a gap in the museum of my imagination I had sensed for a long time. It was accompanied by an irrational conviction that I knew him well and for ever … A road through a ...”

“... Tarquin’s deed is ‘black’. Bailey reproduces a painting by the 16th-century Flemish artist Jan Sanders van Hemessen of a dark-featured Tarquin with curly black hair grabbing a snow-white Lucrece. Opposite is an image by Artemisia Gentileschi (c.1650) of a black slave looking on while Tarquin attacks Lucrece with a dagger. Did early readers assume, when ...”

“... among the cognoscenti like a confederation of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have built up their own collections of the ...”

“... card-carrying Cockneys, a way out, a trip into the unknown. Musician and long-distance pedestrian Jan Wobble recalls his sabbatical as a minicabber, ferrying striped faces south of the river for regular bits of business, cash drops. These heavy suits would sit, white-knuckled, fingers digging into the scarlet leather, until they made it safely home to ...”

“... into cruel close-up on your screens at the end of the compelling torment to ask (the question mark ironic): “You have been distressed by my music, you worms?” ’ All three critics share the comforting belief that, au fond, the artist is great because he is morally commendable. This is sentimental in two important respects. It undervalues skill and ...”

“... Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia Andrukhovychtranslated by Uilleam BlackerOn​  the first day, we hid in the Mins’ka metro station with our dog, Zlata. The ...”

“... evoked rather than named directly, steadily entered the religious history of humanity in order to mark its poorest, most elementary stage. Thus Europeans discovered shamans thanks to the Russian Empire’s expansion towards the east. Or rediscovered them. This clarification seems to me appropriate for two reasons. First, between the 16th and 17th centuries ...”