“... profile and monkish tonsure on display. Toulouse-Lautrec and van Dongen followed suit. Fénéon may not have liked it, but it was the more interesting view. In full face he looks as if he might be someone else: in old age he resembled Gide. Whereas the profile shot offered artists much more promising material: a big boney nose, prominent chin and, beneath ...”

“... of whom? Of the executive, certainly; of the parties to the dispute; of external pressures which may distort judgment; of personal biases: and no doubt of more besides. The Universal Declaration on the Independence of Justice adopted in Montreal in 1983 asserts: ‘Judges individually shall be free, and it shall be their duty, to decide matters before them ...”

“... Star’ of their poetry, though Fenton’s minor masterpiece ‘A Vacant Possession’ may, and conceivably should, be what they strive to match. Reflexive, aleatory and cornucopian, the New Narrative deploys its fragmented and ramifying fictions to image the unpredictability of life, and its continuous shadowing by What Might Be. It seems, in ...”

“... The Peter Wright trial in Australia has recently brought out the full absurdity of this, with Sir Robert Armstrong attempting at one point to suggest that the very existence of MI5 and MI6 (let alone the identity of their directors) was a secret which could neither be confirmed nor denied. There is no other state in the world which behaves like this and ...”

“... a return of sorts to the day before the meeting with Pascal, when she encountered Lucien’s uncle Robert, who may be planning something sexual for her, then a brief shower, and at last she’s off to her meeting, back in the narrative present. I wish I could say there is a reason for any of this, but I was left with the ...”

“... are two problems with these accounts. First, the test of Orange Herald was held on Friday, 31 May: it would not have been physically possible for the story to appear before the following Monday. In other words, the journalists wrote their stories in advance of the test, on the basis of a briefing from Brigadier Jehu, who had seen the first test – Short ...”

“... belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia; they were Germans first, Jews second. Their father, Robert, was a statistician, president of the Berlin Stock Exchange and owner of the largest private library in Germany. Like his son years later in London, Robert Kuczynski knew many prominent left-wingers, including Karl ...”

“... period confront us from the back wall while in the middle of the floor, humped in silence, is Robert Morris’s big low cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No self-respecting museum would present a combination which was so insouciant ...”

“... early impetus by such older artists as Joseph Beuys, Jannis Kounellis, Marcel Broodthaers, Robert Rauschenberg, or by Vienna Aktionists such as Hermann Nitsch, or practitioners of happenings such as Claes Oldenburg, all of whom felt the need to attack the autonomous work of art. Far less overtly political than many of their exemplars, the performance ...”

“... chapel at Shrewsbury. Shelley and Byron condemned or satirised war in their own styles. Blake may deserve the palm. He saw and heard in imagination, as we can do with less effort now: Albion’s mountains run with blood, the cries of war and of tumult Resound into the unbounded night. And he had the same sympathy for enemy France, where ‘the pale ...”

“... Bunting in Tenerife and Julian Bell at Wuhan University! Mr Fussell, who has a fondness for what may be termed enumerative criticism, produces a long list of such displacements. And all through the Twenties and Thirties this Sehnsucht remains rampant and the flight goes on – England at peace being even harder to take than England at war. Auden and MacNeice ...”

“... the place,’ James wrote, ‘had seemed cruel to the poor little dressmaker outside, it may be believed that it did not strike her as an abode of mercy while she pursued her devious way into the circular shafts of cells … there were walls within walls and galleries on top of galleries; even the daylight lost its colour.’Millbank Prison had ...”

“... afternoon, with its atmosphere of electioneering and death, brings to mind the insistent taps of Robert Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’: The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year – wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns. Senator John Forbes Kerry, the nominee, didn’t spring ...”

“... could I emote?Using Shakespeare to emote has been one of the constants of Pacino’s life and may well have been more important to him than cinema. Marlon Brando (his co-star in The Godfather) apparently once said that he would make the ideal Shylock. ‘How Marlon saw that in me, I’ll never know,’ Pacino notes in his memoir, Sonny Boy, skilfully ...”

“... to him. This enthralling new account of Sorge, by the veteran British journalist and old Asia hand Robert Whymant, confirms what I had long suspected: Sorge and Philby were psychic twins, two textbook examples of the rare species we might call Homo undercoverus – those who find the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not (Sorge ...”