“... formation, must wait for unpredictable shifts in scholarly taste. Then an unexploited deposit may become a cultural ore worth mining.‘Curios’, Wellcome called them: things made (masks, spears, microscopes, instruments, whole pharmacies); parts of people (a bit of Jeremy Bentham’s skin, strands of George III’s hair, mummies, brains and the odd hand ...”

“... Man with a Turban (1629), on display at Turning Heads at the National Gallery of Ireland (until 26 May), is contemplative rather than active.Lievens was not one for wild expression or extreme physiognomy; his tronies summon a striking human presence. He could render human heads as unforgettable apparitions. In a self-portrait of c.1635, his features are ...”

“... threatening glances with a passer-by. In Vancouver in 1982, when the picture was taken, it may have been more blindingly obvious that (as Wall relates it) the man’s reflexive gesture constituted racial abuse. Mimicry: a white trash white man mimics an Asian man’s eyes, repeating a gesture that lingers in the culture. But the picture is more dynamic ...”

“... seems to say that by the crap we make and eat, by the way we look, dress and enjoy ourselves you may know us for being less than we might ...”

“... most theoretical) of Empson’s books will have something to say even to the young, who may suppose that really serious rhetorical analysis only got going in the late Sixties. However, The Royal Beasts is not criticism, though it shows the intellectual force of the critical books of the Thirties, and sometimes reminds us of them. It is striking, for ...”

“... a forerunner of returning wisdom.’ I have no experience of royal persons, some of whom I think may still ‘what-what’ a little. Today, though, it’s easier. What royalty wants nowadays is deference without awe, though what they get more often than not is a fatuous smile, any social awkwardness veiled in nervous laughter so that the Queen moves among ...”

“... its dramas not at the pithead or the factory gate but at the Rover’s Return. Improbable as it may now seem, the North in the Sixties – anyway the early Sixties, when Harold Wilson made his appearance as the great iconoclast, when the Mersey Sound first captured the nation’s record-players and when Z-Cars put Liverpool in the front line of ...”

“... Michael Flood, Frederick Saxby, Valentine Fane, Griffiths Davies and so on: there were many – may yet turn out to be comrades from the trenches, those other persons he so loved. Although writing of place-names rather than people, P.J. Kavanagh puts the matter exactly in the introduction to his wonderful Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney (1982): ‘Like most ...”

“... for the traditional rivalry of self-esteem between physicians and surgeons, as I suppose it may have been for the apostasy that made old Dr Thomas give up medicine for surgery. Therapeutic nihilism, says Lewis, was a ‘reaction to the kind of medicine taught and practised in the early part of the 19th century, when anything that happened to pop into ...”

“... death was given as ‘heart failure’: Mandelstam did suffer from a heart complaint, though he may in fact have died of typhus. His widow reports the way in which she was given the news: I was sent a notice asking me to go to the post office at Nikita Gate. Here I was handed back the parcel I had sent to M. in the camp. ‘The addressee is dead,’ the ...”

“... and a public opinion that was very different than anything in the States.’ But it wasn’t until May 2005, a month after Oborne’s new book came out, that a report dated 23 July 2002 surfaced in the Sunday Times detailing the conversations that the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, had with his counterparts in Washington. It contained the killer ...”

“... you a new image, downloaded and printed from the Internet. It is an image of Robert Thompson as he may look now. Vengeance is evergreen, and the regulars know the image by heart and they watch the door.I don’t mean to marshal these thoughts, as Johnson said, into a school and call it an academy, but I believe people in Britain experienced an entanglement ...”

“... reels off the names of the several Parmesans that they stock, ending up with a flourish: ‘Or you may like to try the Reggiano, the Rolls Royce of Parmesans.’ 8 May. Much in the papers about VE Day, today the 60th anniversary. Several people who were in the crowd outside Buckingham Palace remember how they chanted: ‘We ...”

“... 2020), though recent economic setbacks suggest, as with similar predictions about India, that this may prove to be fantasy. Wealth has brought disconcerting changes: large parts of Sumatra, ravaged by slash-and-burn investors, resemble a lunar landscape, and smoke from land-clearing fires started by palm-oil prospectors extends as far as the cities of Malaysia ...”

“... one. By all accounts he was very good at it. The final national servicemen were demobilised in May 1963, just a few days before Profumo confessed to the House of Commons that he had lied about the nature of his relationship with Christine Keeler. After Profumo’s resignation, there were two further, short-lived secretaries of state for war (Joseph Godber ...”