“... his bare feet submerged in the pile of a white rug in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, the portrait by David Hockney that aspired to Gainsborough as a take on the aristocracy of London, c.1971, but owed more to Harpers & Queen. The fashion bubble of Sixties London was not quite the fourth dynasty or the historical watershed of the Crimean War. What was of interest ...”

“... David Reubeni​ posed a puzzle to contemporaries; he still poses one today. The Mediterranean world was turbulent in the early decades of the 16th century. The Ottoman Empire toppled the Mamluks in 1517, giving the sultan control over Egypt, Syria and much of the Arabian Peninsula; Western Christian rulers feared that they might be next ...”

“... If there are general principles to literary naming, and yet everybody does it differently, then it may turn out to be a practice as mysterious as language use and as idiosyncratic as aesthetic appreciation: there may well be underlying principles, but variations may be so extensive that ...”

“... want if they are to get re-elected. As Moyn writes, ‘if the voters are wealthy and old, it may not even matter whether the politicians are young.’ I got a glimpse of this dynamic at work in another setting following the general election of 2019. Shortly after the result I met Dehenna Davison, the newly elected Conservative MP for Bishop Auckland, who ...”

“... Exchange Building. In 1993, one man, George Heron, had been acquitted of her murder; now another, David Boyd, was about to stand trial.In 1992, Sunderland’s shipyards had closed down, Monkwearmouth colliery was about to be mothballed and, though Liebherr cranes still tilted their long necks across the docks, and Nissan was mass-producing Primeras and Micras ...”

“... are interpreted as proof, and Covid becomes the string on which any and all conspiracy theories may be threaded. Seen through the conspiracist filter, by forcing us to wear masks, by closing bars and isolating the frail elderly, by trying to terrify us over, as they see it, a dose of flu, or by microwaving us with 5G, the secret elite has shown its hand.Now ...”

“... up to the Macclesfield Mamba for five minutes. Tom steps into the ring, his jaw set. Young he may be, but he is also lithe and fit, his limbs straight and his heart British ... By clever footwork he evades the lethal clutch of the Mamba for the first four and a half minutes, but at last he is caught when the Mamba pretends to stumble and Tom offers him ...”

“... the stages of nature as they have changed through the successive periods of British prehistory. David Stoddart’s conclave of geographers engage in a philosophical exploration of geography itself. It is always a pleasure to find a tribute to the schoolroom. Richard Muir was fortunate to have an inspiring teacher who contrived to overcome ‘the tedious O ...”

“... with Keira as the once and future whistleblower Katharine Gun, watching Tony Blair explain to David Frost why it was necessary for Britain to go to war. ‘Bloody liar,’ she says. ‘They’re all bloody liars.’ Frost and Bliar don’t react. (I remember this too, the fury and the not-reacting.) Blair leans forward and insists that Saddam has weapons ...”

“... safely (if painfully and disastrously) in the mind. No director realises this more clearly than David Cronenberg. He is best known no doubt for The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988) and his much vilified Crash (1996), but some of us have a soft spot, if that’s the term, for his early work The Brood (1979), a classic instance of the acting-out theory. A ...”

“... wall. There is something Magrittean about the emptiness and puzzlement of the small scene. There may be a clue to its meaning in the strange perspective of the window bars, their connecting joints angled outwards to suggest a point of view closer to the window than the point from which it has been painted, as though the viewer were a single eyeball, drifting ...”

“... then shadow chancellor, and he wanted to be Britain’s first Asian prime minister. Amin, who may not have been so high up the kill list, was interviewed by Good Morning Britain shortly after going to Syria, and told the interviewer that leaving Gatwick had been ‘one of the happiest moments in my life’. Both young men had appeared from Syria in an ...”

“... surrenders his typewriter keys to another person, an immigrant child who, like himself, may conceivably grow up to be the ‘writer in the family’. Other examples of this convention would be easy to find. Where earlier centuries preferred the modes of tragic or comic finality – ‘Go, bid the soldiers shoot’ or ‘And they all lived happily ...”

“... at Viv’s birthday party, who wears an elaborate costume in keeping with the undersea theme but may not be on the guest list. The two timeframes, only marginally out of phase, fold smoothly into each other when the narrative of Molly’s work day catches up with her evening panic and its aftermath. At this point Phillips starts to hold back the momentum. It ...”

“... David Hockney’s new study, Secret Knowledge, sets out a thesis with vast implications, both for the way we look at Old Master paintings and the way we think about painting’s relation to photography. The more attention you give the thesis, however, the more Hockney’s presentation starts to frustrate you. What you get is, first, a brisk illustrated lecture explaining how he hit on his ideas, a lecture that involves rushing every which way round the National Gallery, pointing out telling visual evidence and adding speculative asides ...”