“... and ‘every single postwar prime minister, from Clement Attlee (whom I met at the theatre) to David Cameron’, as well as other ‘formidable and extraordinarily interesting people, despite being rather dull myself’. She was born, as Jean Campbell-Harris, in 1922 to aristocratic parents who sent her to a series of schools where she was ‘dreadfully ...”

“... without at the same time feeling obliged to deliver embarrassing lectures to the Germans and the French – of all people – about how their economies could become as productive as the British. Whatever Mr Blair might think about the leaders of Old Labour, at least they had no such illusions about the capacities of the average British businessman. To make ...”

“... to be added to spore suspensions to stop them clumping when they are prepared and dried, but as David Henderson from Porton Down said in 1952, in a journal to be found in any medical school library, ‘fortunately many substances added to the suspension will prevent clumping. The simplest and most effective that has been found is sodium alginate used in ...”

“... straight line and the monumental vista (the straight line, Carmona maintains, was quintessentially French, while omitting to mention that this was so largely from the point of view of the ruling classes: Victor Hugo, in his ‘Guerre aux démolisseurs’, attacked the obsession with the straight line by linking it directly to the oppressive exercise of state ...”

“... boring Arsenal. Even when they won, they were losers.In 1989, while coaching Monaco, Wenger met David Dein, the Arsenal vice chairman. Wenger went to an Arsenal match and after the game shared a cigarette with a friend of Barbara Dein, David’s wife. He was invited to their house in Totteridge, North London, for supper ...”

“... legitimate, he said, to pay your rent, sleep with your wife and, now and then, to write proper French). When, at thirty, he became bald, he rejoiced at being liberated from the company of barbers, ‘who exhaled into my face their disdain, or caressed me like a mistress, or patted my cheek like a parish priest’. But his hair still defined his ...”

“... held in 1996 to explore the implications of a seminal article published as long ago as 1974 by the French historian Jean Bérenger. Bérenger had argued that it was not a mere coincidence that all-powerful prime ministerial favourites – Richelieu, Olivares, Buckingham – emerged more or less simultaneously in the three West European countries which were ...”

“... about the ‘true’ writings of Karl Ove Knausgaard, or the huge amount of attention paid to David Shields’s polemic Reality Hunger. Time and again we hear about a new desire for the real, about a realism which is realistic set against an avant-garde which isn’t, and so on. It’s disheartening that such simplistic oppositions are still being put ...”

“... unknown, as applied to females; They had taught me to read, & speak, & think, & translate from the French, till I was half a Prodigy.’ She learned French, Spanish and Italian (translating Racine freely in her critique of Pope’s Essay on Man, and Spectator articles into Italian), and at 17 met her tutor and ‘first ...”

“... what still survives as the general view of the literary achievements of the Middle Ages, of the French and English theatres and of the German and English 19th-century novels. Mahmond Manzaloui draws attention to the curious parallels between the tragic case-histories of lovers in the Islamic haadith, the Heroides of Ovid and the western courtly ...”

“... un-compelling. It’s not simply that the characters are one-dimensional; the characters in David Lodge’s campus novels may be one-dimensional but they are invested with buoyancy and a sense of inner propulsion. Moo, on the other hand, reads as though it had been plotted on a chart. The oddity is that one feels that Smiley could, if she wanted ...”

“... Rainbow, Salisbury Cathedral’ from ‘Various Subjects of Landscape’ after John Constable by David Lucas (1837) The uses of adversity are sweet as well as bitter, as the old Duke in Shakespeare almost said, and what is best about Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape is probably as much a result of hard times as what is not so ...”

“... mostly about America, Kinney is at her best when writing about America, though she is good too on David Cameron’s 2006 ‘hug a hoodie’ speech. She describes it as ‘clumsy’, but approves of one part, which she describes, in a telling phrase, as ‘haunting’. ‘For young people, hoodies are often more defensive than offensive,’ Cameron ...”

“... horrible that was sticking to them. A spectacular daube at a dinner party, recipe by Elizabeth David but with a freehand addition by the cook, had it – lips this time pursed, thumb and forefinger connected to indicate perfection. A work of art, of course, had a je ne sais quoi, spoken with wide eyes and lips apart to perform a look of wonder, and one ...”

“... literal representation of drug-induced visions on show is a virtual reality installation by the French filmmaker Jan Kounen, Ayahuasca: Kosmik Journey (2019). In places it captures the visual component of the ayahuasca experience with striking precision – the seething mass of serpents that assails the viewer in the opening phase has a properly ...”