“... Years ago, the Sunday newspaper I had joined as a junior reporter sent me one Saturday afternoon to see Sir Thomas Beecham, then at the height of his fame as a conductor. The paper had written his profile, and I was told to take a proof and show it to him, to ensure that it was factually correct ...”

“... Frogs​ could be heard croaking, one hot spring day in 1688, in a ditch beside a meadow where Antoni van Leeuwenhoek liked, as he put it, to wander ‘for my amusement’. Peering down, he glimpsed spawn clinging to the pondweed. A servant must have been at hand, for Leeuwenhoek wrote: ‘I then had some of this green plant to which these Eggs were attached brought to my house ...”

“... We’re confident it’s real’: Arthur Aron is a psychologist who has discovered that blood-flows in the brains of people claiming to be in love after decades of marriage resemble those of new lovers. Romance may authentically survive: ‘That’s what the brain scans are telling us. People can’t fake that ...”

“... early morning, Friday 22 May, and radio reports tell of streams of voters heading to the polls. As I buy the Irish Times at the newstand in Terminal One, I catch sight of one of my graduate students – we nod and smile quickly. He’s flying to Cork to vote Yes. I haven’t a vote, but ...”

“... Tangier, then the Loire – when he found himself ‘dreaming of the idea of somehow creating a living place where works of art could be enjoyed, inherent to the domestic setting, where young people could be at home unhampered by the greater austerity of the museum or public art gallery, and where ...”

“... Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather. Boswell believed, Sher writes, that ...”

“... An 11-person team of Ukrainian cavers were wading through the snow on the way down from the Arabika massif in the western Caucasus on a January night. They had just descended the Krubera Cave to a depth of 1710 metres, thus breaking the world record ...”

“... from the ‘Ithaca’ section of Ulysses, the quintessence of home seen from abroad. Home can be a bit smug, though; and sometimes constricting. The poetic celebrants of home at the moment tend not to be women. But if it was once fashionable to see home as a ‘provincial’ bore, there ...”

“... I’ve done it,’ Horace shouts at the end of his third book of Odes. ‘I’ve made a monument more lasting than bronze … Something that neither biting rain, nor an immeasurable succession of years could cause to crumble.’ Bronze has long been a byword for enduring monumentality, and some of the items on display in the Royal Academy’s exhibition Bronze (until 9 December) are 5700 years old, apparently ...”

“... When she arrived at the Slade, in 1910, Dora Carrington looked quite conventional. But she soon hacked off her long hair into an androgynous bob. Her sophisticated friends Barbara Hiles and Dorothy Brett went bobbed too and the three became known as the ‘Slade cropheads ...”

“... my education in poetry began, the first image that comes to mind is that of my father’s library at the old family home of Fieldhead on the Thames. It is an autumn or winter evening after tea, for James the butler has been in to draw the blinds and close the curtains, and my father is reading under ...”

“... I do not come to Lilliputia with a measuring stick.’ This was Gore Vidal, a week or two ago, when asked to say which of our two main parties was the more right-wing. The British election, in Gore’s lofty view, is ‘parish-pump politics’, a juvenile charade compared to America’s great billion-dollar circuses ...”

“... The upright canvas, some 4’6’’ by 3’, stood on Salvator Rosa’s easel, prepared with a burnt umber ground. The painter first attacked it, as far as I can see, with a black-loaded brush, dragging a jagged stuttery line almost from top to bottom ...”

“... For as long as he has been exhibiting Kitaj has been publishing commentary on his pictures. With him the two activities interlock, coming closer to the idea of the calligram that Foucault played with in his essay on Magritte than to anything that we usually expect from artists’ statements, almost always touched as they are with bravado in the face of the incompatibility of words and pictures ...”

“... The life​ and work of Dora Carrington have long been overshadowed by her death. As is often the way with suicides, later viewers find it hard to lose hindsight. For all the vivacity in many of her paintings, which seem to vibrate with joy in colour and form, she is often cast as a tragic figure ...”