“... like an 8mm geography-lesson module from the 1960s.)Yet the suspicion that everything on display may one way or another be thought of as ‘art’ is carefully – and brilliantly – allowed to linger in the visitor’s mind. Mack and his colleagues had already managed this in the Museum of Mankind with their later acquisitions (only intermittently ...”

“... same year, was ‘that faithful old pick-me-up for sick socialists: indignation’. Indignation may be the thing he enjoyed most – in the short term (eloquently) and over the long haul (diligently). In the LRB as in Private Eye, he wrote about corporate fraud, lies and general skulduggery (about BCCI, about Consolidated Goldfields, about the case of ...”

“... were replaced with standard gauge in 1892. (In one weekend – from daybreak on Saturday, 21 May to 4 a.m. on the Monday – 4200 workers converted 171 route miles of the main line. The Monday mail train ran on time.) But Brunel’s decision to specify something bigger, better or more daring than the norm was logical, not hubristic: he believed it would ...”

“... blossomed from a minor discussion group into the engine for the continent’s Islamisation.’ You may never have heard of the Euro-Arab Dialogue, but that only goes to show how powerful it is. And according to Niall Ferguson, ‘future historians will one day regard her coinage of the term “Eurabia” as prophetic. Those who wish to live in a free society ...”

“... people concerned with the particular case, cannot grapple with such a wide range of problems. He may even be unaware that they exist: he will certainly be unable to explore their implications. Reforms of this magnitude require legislation. Parliament can ensure that it is properly advised and that its Bill is fully considered and subject to wide-ranging ...”

“... its central problem will still remain a mystery to the reader who is not an Ilongot and may be searching for materialist arguments to complement Rosaldo’s analysis of Ilongot thought, her book achieves a rich and definite level of understanding which unites the description of social process and cultural meaning in a single mode of ...”

“... not wholes – but rather of time and gravity on bodily form. From these commitments emerge what may be her most expressive sculptures, a group of teardrop-shaped plaster pendants that resulted from a process she called ‘gravistimulated casting’. It’s not difficult to work out what this means, or why a sculptor so interested in nature should conjure ...”

“... beautiful, fact-crammed catalogue accompanying the British Museum’s Hawaii exhibition (until 25 May) explains that the malo loloa, a long loincloth made of barkcloth, was a metaphor for Hawaii forming alliances. When, just over two hundred years ago, the young King Liholiho (known as Kamehameha II) and Queen Kamāmalu sailed from Hawaii to Britain, seeking ...”

“... Stanton De Priest for taking his wife to a White House tea: ‘That burr-headed wife of De Priest may be good enough for Mrs Herbert Hoover, but I’ll tell you here and now that she’s not good enough for you.’ Keener on sniffing out communists than Nazis, he focused his most intense investigations on the scripts of the Federal Theatre. A fellow ...”

“... is apparently best-qualified to hold it. The BBC has even been heard to argue that, although women may not participate in programmes in numbers reflecting their share of the population (in which, of course, they constitute the majority), they do sufficiently represent the small proportion of their sex in public life. Meanwhile, bravely pioneering women have ...”

“... Premiership. The waves of cash that have rolled into the game since the deal with Sky in 1991 may not have fundamentally altered the character of the sport – a quarter of a century ago, Tom Stoppard was making a character in his play Professional Foul complain about the ‘yob ethics’ of the game – but they have made it worse. The players are ...”

“... the benefits which sometimes follow a war – the NHS has its own show cabinet. At this point you may begin to feel a dissonance between the building and its use: to find that the rhetoric of the architecture and of the sound and light show which justifies its darkness, scale and arrangement is out of step with the dispassionate analysis of war and of the ...”

“... work. We are encouraged to carry the process begun by the painter to a conclusion of our own. It may be richer and will certainly be more personal than any a resolved finish could achieve. The innate vitality and productive ambiguity of the marks on the canvas mediated a modern way of looking. Drawings and sketches had always given connoisseurs the thrill of ...”

“... online can apply to author-direct.co.uk, a new website launched at the Hay-on-Wye festival in May. It goes live some time this month. Laurence Middleton Jones, the company’s managing director, believes he is in a position to find ‘tomorrow’s writers today’, while at the same time describing electronic publishing as a ‘refreshing step into the ...”

“... the Tories, its membership amounts to 0.06 per cent of the electorate. The amateur Ukip enthusiast may have meant only that he hoped we were among the 2.7 million people who voted for the party (6.2 per cent of the electorate) – a hundred times more probable, but still pretty unlikely. Wishful thinking is a hallmark of Ukip, and they’re self-importantly ...”