“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the list of the world’s thousand most polluted cities, with air as clean as the Northern French town of Roubaix, terminus of the famous cycle race.That those gains are so large doesn’t mean there aren’t much bigger ones to reap. In China, more than a million people still die each year from air pollution. In Africa, another million. In ...”

“... 1972 winner, John Berger, in denouncing capitalism and Booker’s treatment of Guyanese workers. David Lean optioned the novel a year later, and though the project came to nothing, Farrell found himself in funds for the first time in his life. After finishing The Singapore Grip in his two-room flat in South Kensington, he bought a cottage on the coast of ...”

“... that Netanyahu hadn’t consulted them about the bombing, which made a mockery of the American and French push for a ceasefire between Israel and Hizbullah, to which Netanyahu had privately given his approval. Never mind the Americans’ frequent warnings about the dangers of escalation, and their stated desire to avoid a confrontation with Iran. For ...”

“... start, he seemed unlikely to develop into a respected master of the art film, a pillar of the new French cinema, as Chabrol, Resnais, Rohmer and Truffaut were all to become. If anything, he seemed more likely to become a new Cocteau, never quite integrated into the industry, always the poet rather than the practitioner, a filmmaker with a fatal soft spot for ...”

“... the early English colonists. They could not afford the more languid colonialism of the Russian and French empires, whose fur traders established tributaries and commerce over the course of centuries, as well as making occasional attempts at the religious indoctrination of peoples in the tundra and wilderness that no settler planned to inhabit. The strength and ...”

“... democratic political order.Conservatism was created by a series of interlocking challenges: the French Revolution, industrialisation, and the insistence of late Enlightenment thinkers that human reason could make a better society than that ordained by traditional religious worldviews. In the 19th century, liberals fashioned a new political world, one ...”