“... air. Angela Merkel is a big fan of it, and says that ventilating a room – lüften – may be the saving of mankind, and the cheapest way to contain the virus. She can become quite deep on the subject – a friend of mine used to call it ‘Black Forest thinking’. Stosslüften requires that a window be opened wide at least once a day to give a ...”

“... on the screen: MICKEY BARNES. The only one. Except, of course, that name is quite common. We may have to start thinking ...”

“... Manuel Moreno; the pale-faced man beside him, waiting, it would seem, for the session to be over, may be the composer Luigi Boccherini (Don Luis was keen on music as well as on hunting and science). The man smiling out at us, like a child looking to catch the eye of a parent when he should be attending to his part in the school play, is Boccherini’s ...”

“... to the Brighton of little antique shops: a town that loves things. The big Edward Lear landscape may not be as brisk and decisive as his watercolour sketches, but it’s only fair to take his own preferences seriously once in a while. Pictures – certainly the pictures here – were, on the whole, made for middle-class walls. Solid, churchgoing ...”

“... shudder and tremble a little in a high wind, rain will still rattle on tin roofs (although you may hear it less now insulation is better) and Wellington houses will still be scattered, broadcast like seed over the mounded hills.The high-rise buildings in the middle of town squat heavily, hinting at the muscle which will hold them together when an ...”

“... that would support it.This distinction, between building up to a sensation and working from it, may sound like something of greater importance to the artist than to the viewer, but that’s not how it turns out. Instead, because the desired effect is preconceived, the more recent paintings are invested with a noticeably lower degree of tension. The cycle of ...”

“... show that, no matter how heterogeneous or artificial the boundaries of any given European colony may have been, they continue to exist today. Of the 52 countries in Africa, the vast majority arbitrary fabrications of rival imperialist powers, just one – Sudan – has failed to persist within the same frontiers as an independent state. In Asia, the same ...”

“... couples who were solemnly kissing the icon in the small church at Peredelkino – a church that may only recently have opened again, along with hundreds of others – were not interested in aesthetic quality; they were enacting a ritual practice mocked in 1922 by Mayakovsky in one of his so-called ‘Agitpoems’, written for Soviet newspapers: And while ...”

“... of the competitiveness of his profession and of any infections of aggressive masculinity he may have picked up from reading Emerson or the ever-devious Hawthorne. His contentions are that in the North-Eastern United States before the Civil War ‘the reigning ideology of manhood oriented itself toward power, not feeling’ – such dichotomies ...”

“... The ghettoisation and sub-sequent deportation of Salonika’s Jews took place between February and May 1943, with one last train in August. What Waldheim knew or didn’t know is impossible to prove, but he wasn’t there. The French journalists did hit upon one interesting story that I had not seen published outside Austria before, which has to do with how ...”

“... based more on his irrational hatred of England than on any natural Fascism; he and his wife may have been the only people in the whole of Norway who wanted Germany to ‘bring England to its knees’, as he madly implored in one wartime newspaper article. The heroes of Hamsun’s novels of the 1890s are wrongly seen, in most criticism, as ...”

“... three dozen kinds of birds. Henrik’s letters to Kierkegaard, mumbling and incoherent as they may be, tell of an immense affection and admiration that could not find out the source of their own need. Henrik wanted so much to ask Søren Kierkegaard something, some vital question, but exactly what question it was he had to ask, just would not come to ...”

“... Anniversary of the Founding of the Republic. The fifth under German occupation, and we pray it may be the last. We’d been promised reinforcements today, waited all day, at last they came. What a crew – worse than useless. As far as I can tell they are Prague coffee-house Jews, the lot of them. They all speak Czech – of sorts (!). It does seem to have ...”

“... it cost its composer before he was able to present it in its ‘final’ form in Vienna on 23 May 1814. It is the only work of its kind he ever completed; it caused him a great deal of pain; yet despite the attention he lavished on it, he failed to get the satisfaction from it, in terms either of popular success or of aesthetic conviction, that his ...”

“... except for the very occasional corner or patch of wall, where a mysterious heap of personal trash may be piled up. Every morning, early, a small white cleaning truck comes along with its revolving brushes, pausing by a diminutive metal trash bag holder for the crew to remove and replace the suspended trash bag. Supplementing this vehicle are individual men in ...”