“... the Royal Academy until 8 February (after which it will travel, first to Iowa, then to Toronto), may sound like safe family entertainment designed to appease the Friends and Academicians dismayed by Sensation in the rooms below. It is in fact an original and valuable exhibition devoted to a curious and often daring development in British painting in the ...”

“... Brighton had several, and became the epitome of the beach. ‘You hear nothing and see nothing,’ Richard Jeffries wrote of Brighton’s beach in The Open Air (1885): It is perfectly comfortable, perfectly jolly and exhilarating, a preferable spot to any other. A sparkle of sunshine on the breakers, a dazzling gleam from the white foam, a warm sweet ...”

“... We may​ think all biopics are biofantasies, in which case the opening title card of Adam McKay’s new film Vice will have us laughing already. After all, he is the former Saturday Night Live writer who made The Big Short, a very funny movie about the 2008 financial crisis. The card says: ‘The following is a true story ...”

“... commanders, traders and amateur sleuths collected objects and relics from the area: signs of what may have become of the lost men. Handkerchiefs, soap, sponges, slippers, combs, forks and spoons were all brought back. One of the ships sent out after Franklin, the HMS Resolute, itself became trapped in the ice. Timbers from its hull were later retrieved and a ...”

“... is barely hinted at in the briefing documents, but the implication is that the metaphor repository may provide the clue to understanding the hidden aims of different factions where some dispute is involved. What would it tell us if it turned out that encoded in the very language of the Iranian people is the concept that LIFE IS A BLAST? Unfortunately, it ...”

“... for representing the world as it is. Reported detail is not just roughage but nourishment, and Richard Price’s Lazarus Man could have been written in honour of Wolfe’s prescriptions.Wolfe proposed journalism as a necessary ingredient of consequential fiction, repeating the prediction he made in 1973 in The New Journalism that the future of the novel ...”

“... more than mere philosophical speculation in mind. The Enquiry was discussed by Pitt’s cabinet in May, but although the book might have been expected to encounter the full force of the law – as Paine’s similarly argued Rights of Man (1791) had done two years earlier – Godwin wasn’t prosecuted. ‘A three-guinea book could never do much harm among ...”

“... Butterfield, Frederick Pilkington, Dominikus and Gottfried Böhm, Claude Parent, Rodney Gordon, Richard Rogers (in his Gothic moods), Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of Italian Fascism Douglas Stephen, architect of a ‘Dan Dare mini-skyscraper’ in Swindon, or the South London aesthete Sextus Dyball, designer of ...”

“... Rowan.’ (Rowan was an 18th-century patriot.) With this sentence out guide is in difficulties. We may allow a child and an old lady to give pet-names to two brushes. It is another thing to be told that ‘as he grows older’ he ‘meditates’ on actual historical events. We become sceptical. A novel is not a biography. Dedalus is not Joyce. We ask ourselves ...”

“... male fairies, or incubuses, had a reputation for being lovers, rapists, sexual predators. They may have disappeared, but the friars on their perpetual rounds of what we might call ‘chugging’, visiting peasant households while the husbands are out in the fields, have taken on the role of the creatures they exorcised. The joke didn’t need ...”

“... places, with sudden, untranslatable visions, with the Infinite. The problems of the Enlightenment may be unanswerable, beyond certain remarks about secularism and the march of Reason, but the siting of Romanticism is no less difficult. It may be said that it’s to do with German idealist philosophy, with political ...”

“... between the experience of seeing something and earlier English poetry. It has a tincture of Richard Crashaw’s Counter-Reformation gory godliness; a flavour of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the way it risks going too far with the alliterating ‘bleb’ and ‘blood’; and the echt Hill quality of making it appear that just seeing something can hurt. The ...”

“... The business imagination has been coming into its own in other ways as well. Management Studies may still be considered disreputable in some quarters of the university, but it is no longer that makeshift department of Nissen huts kept off the well-tended preserves of the traditional academic disciplines. The liberal academy’s green-belt areas are now well ...”

“... Sir Arthur fforde, whereas it or ginated in the Pilkington Committee’s report and was drafted by Richard Hoggart, then a member of the committee. The phrase ‘the political establishment’ is used several times. It seems to me portentous and vague. I suspect that if it had to be defined, it would fall out of use. The whole political establishment is said ...”

“... Social Democrat parties as to the liking of the Tories. If it has any socio-political value (which may well be doubted), that value is just there – in saying what nobody, of any political party, wants to hear. It follows that worth in poetry cannot be determined by that favoured device of egalitarian politics, the committee: not even when the committee is ...”