“... and gold. When John Singer Sargent’s tremendous portrait of the colonial administrator Sir Frank Swettenham inspired Rebecca West to comment that ‘he looked as if he wasn’t quite a gentleman,’ was she showing her sensitivity to the excess of his display? To the unfurling, regal drapery behind him (from his collection of Malayan fabrics), to the ...”

“... the government’s strategy in the upcoming inquiry will be to blame the scientists. The report, frank in many respects, has an echoing, cathedral-like silence around the personal responsibility of the prime minister. But as Calvert and Arbuthnott make clear, Johnson’s leadership, or lack of it, was central to the government’s failure, then and ...”

“... toward something ‘other than imagery – towards narrative’. Having broken a taboo with his frank and sometimes repellent account of his feelings for his parents, Guibert is now free to launch into his most horrendous book, Vous m’avez fait former des fantômes, a nightmarish, stomach-turning récit about capturing and torturing children. The title ...”

“... of the music into the life which is most damaging to the music. Hence, Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge reflects ‘all the conflicting states of mind Britten was experiencing while he composed it’, even down to his ‘delight in discovering the Suffolk countryside’ ‘Peter Grimes becomes Britten’s dream of what he might be like if he abandoned ...”

“... thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. For too long, Bishop had lived these moral choices of life/death, right/wrong, male/female: but at last, the early happy years with Lota had made them seem irrelevant, and Bishop, longing for Paradise since her blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ...”

“... out in a rash of names, accepts the way English intellectuals have treated ideas by keeping them close to the tea-table or a ‘domestic idiom’. There is little ventilation: no reference (except nominally) to Lukacs, who sets theory against alienation and fragmentation; no acknowledgment of the Frankfurt School’s attempt to frame an ideology-critique; no ...”

“... to last?’ A farmer in Yorkshire wrote to the BBC to protest that ‘with over forty years’ close contact with the working classes I am appalled at the accumulating and increasing interest taken by them in this swine’s broadcasting.’ Joyce’s biggest attraction, however, was that he gave a different account of the war’s progress (what little ...”

“... the same level of normative literary language as the surrounding narration, here the writer comes close to assigning substandard Hebrew to the rude Esau. The famished brother cannot even come up with the ordinary Hebrew word for ‘stew’ (nazid) and instead points to the bubbling pot impatiently as (literally) ‘this red red’. The verb he uses for ...”

“... also an inherently unstable fiction.’This isn’t to say that pre-modern societies forbade frank speaking on principle. In classical times, free citizens were able to speak their minds in the assembly on matters of public interest, civic or religious. In Athens, this liberty was called parrhesia (speaking everything), in Latin, licentia. This sort of ...”

“... once music by Muzak was installed, while, at St Joseph’s Hospital in Yonkers, NY, Dr Frank B. Flood, chief of cardiology, saw improved recovery rates in the intensive care unit.From the start, the two cardinal aims of Muzak’s operation have been that its music should not draw attention to itself and that it should work in optimal co-operation ...”

“... his appalled ‘non-fiction’ book about Stalin and Communism, reviewed in the LRB by Frank Kermode under the rubric ‘Amis’s Terrible News’. For the novelisation, his sources – a narrow range – aren’t so much embellished as systematised, artfully reshuffled and newly dealt. In Koba the Dread Amis, following Solzhenitsyn, wrote that in ...”

“... Michael Gove the slyest and Boris Johnson the most popular of his colleagues, neither of them close to the ERG, both actuated by career rather than conviction – declared themselves for Leave.In parliamentary terms, Remain still had a winning hand, since Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens were all theoretically with Cameron, who ...”

“... particulars from the abstractions which are their surrogates.’ The important things in Freud lie close to the ground, which makes his world of particulars vulnerable in paraphrase. And this is a problem for biography. Psychoanalysis set out to show rather than tell, and to redress the immemorial injury of speaking for the subject. Telling us what is wrong ...”

“... her life, she said, and he was to be the sixth. They lived together for seven years, and remained close until Beauvoir’s death in 1986, a year after her essay in praise of Shoah appeared on the front page of Le Monde. Beauvoir was 17 years older than Lanzmann and excited by his raw spontaneity, a ‘foreign’ temperament that made her feel ...”

“... you a sexist.’ On 3 December 2006, the Sunday Telegraph reported that a focus group convened by Frank Luntz, a Republican ‘strategic communications’ consultant, had compared Cameron to Tunbridge Wells, a cat, white wine and a Rolls Royce. They had also given snap descriptions of the Tory leader: ‘family man’, ‘posh’, ‘English’, ‘nice but ...”