“... young photographers from Japan were taking pictures of other young photographers from Japan. It may be pretty ordinary to most children now – who all have paparazzi for parents – but I was still taken aback to see the scrum around anybody wearing a coloured sock. One man came along the street wearing red braces under a nice grey suit and the Japanese ...”

“... experi-   ences déjà vu. She’s drawing blood, sucking up bodily     fluids wherever they may be. Lestat goes underground   in New Zealand, where once again he proceeds to push his portfolio. Marius subsequently subdues Lestat (Tom Cruise), and   takes him to the Samoan islands where Akasha and Kim     Dotcom sit as statues. Big Time. Face to ...”

“... like Warhol featured subjects wholly alien to the proper figures of official history. But Hamilton may have exceeded both his peers in this regard. For example, when I think of ‘swinging London’ in the 1960s, I see his Swingeing London 67, and when I think of the state violence visited on the student movement in the US, I see his Kent State (1970), a ...”

“... Credit Action, the average British household is £8000 in debt, not including mortgages. The banks may lose out when a borrower goes bust, but they benefit to the tune of £173 million a day in interest payments on various kinds of personal loan. The burden is unevenly spread. In a speech on 15 March Ben Broadbent, an external member of the Bank of England’s ...”

“... likes to use the metaphor of a person who exercises for the first time in a while – many muscles may be sore afterwards, but the exercise has done them good.’ The president is fiercely pro-American, even if he can’t take his lazy, benighted, under-exercised compatriots with him. Like Fireman Sam, Sarkozy was always on the move, even as minister of the ...”

“... many head to the mummies that were MacGregor’s first, childhood experience of the place. I may be snobbish about headphones, but I’m humbled by the scale of what there is to know. The marriage of objects and ideas has a touch of the old-fashioned children’s encyclopedia about it all. But I liked those ...”

“... When Plamen Oresharski, of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, was elected to replace Borisov in May, he quickly squandered whatever trust the electorate might have put in him by appointing Delyan Peevski, a 32-year-old media magnate, as head of the State Agency for National Security. Peevski, according to the New York Times, ‘helps run his mother’s ...”

“... Monday’, he tells me confidentially. ‘I’m going to the fucking races.’ Of course he is. I may be there myself. Diality The shock of remembering, having forgotten for a second, that this isn’t a cure, but a kind of false health, like drug addiction. It performs the trick of taking off the water which builds up in your system, bloating your ...”

“... bees are ‘frozen to the crocuses on the first day of spring’. ‘Seasonal affective disorders may be biochemical in part’ – the human organism has a raw susceptibility to changes in pressure – ‘but they are also cognitive.’ When a low front settles in, hospital admissions rise. Schizophrenia and phantom limb pain among the disabled are some of ...”

“... been formed by Robert Adam’s Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro of 1764, may feel momentarily taken aback, but in essence nothing has changed for the palace is not in the city, the city is in the palace and it has been there, growing and adapting, for more than a thousand years. A washing line at the palace. Diocletian died in ...”

“... leaders has come out of it well (the less said about Clegg the better). Yet the inadvertent result may be as good as could be hoped for in a miserable situation. Putin has shown his ruthless adeptness. The democracies have shown their inconsistency, which is nonetheless a form of flexibility. It is not edifying, but it can be ...”

“... the first in October 1979, a review of J.F.C. Harrison’s book on millenarianism, the last, in May this year, a review of Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. ‘Eloquently’: was that the right word? Not really. Frank’s writing was so much more exact, more stylish, more patient, more ironic, more playful, more attentive, more ...”

“... the solemn, solid, bare-breasted, brown girls surrounded by flowers, fruit, trees and the sea, may have entered the popular imagination as images of blissful indolence but a closer look tells you that the pictures are sad. (In a letter to his wife, Mette, he once described the ‘harmony’ of his colours as ‘sombre, sad, frightening’.) Although his ...”

“... According to the Los Angeles Times, people may have ‘a basic setting on their happiness thermostat’. So don’t blame your current depression on your ex-wife, your sullen children, your forgetful old father, poor exam results, a bad hair day or a piss-poor speech by the pope. Depressing real-life events come and go, but your general capacity to feel gladness is fixed ...”

“... light, as well as Californian money (Stanford was determined to get an answer; a substantial bet may have been involved): cameras were bought from England and fast shutters developed locally. A row of cameras, triggered by the animal itself (later by electric switches), in light bright enough to allow very short exposures (down to a 1000th of a ...”