“... table with South Korea. Everyone was relieved that a delegation from the North went to the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. And Trump says he’s going to see Kim before the end of May, though that’s a meeting that could go either way. Meanwhile, there have been reports of Israel bombing Iranian bases in Syria, and of the US sharing nuclear technology ...”

“... claims made on his behalf, Michael Hofmann’s recent hailing of Brodsky as the true successor to Robert Lowell and great American poet of our age has at least the virtue of unambivalence. We may not agree with it, but the terms are clear. Hitherto, through no fault of his own, the poet has seemed to occupy a position of statelessness somewhere between ...”

“... in their entirety and prefaced by informative and intelligent essays by eminent scholars (Robert Rosenblum in one case, Theodore Reff in the other). Nowhere else in the exhibition do we encounter the concentration of these sheets from the 1916 sketchbook, except perhaps in the near-abstract Cubist drawings in a sketchbook of 1918. But severe ...”

“... A winter evening in Istanbul in the late Seventies. Political murders, disappearances and torture are daily events, and a military coup seems to be in the offing. Galip, a young lawyer whose speciality is defending political prisoners, returns home to find that his wile Rüya has left him. His instinctive response is to pretend that nothing has happened – Rüya is simply too ill to leave the apartment or come to the telephone ...”

“... Robert Henryson is the most likeable late medieval author after Chaucer. He wrote with a directness, a lightly carried learning and a lack of sentimentality hard to match anywhere in the British Isles at any date. A late and sadly unreliable anecdote conveys something of his style. Francis Kynaston reported in the early 17th century that when Henryson was dying of diarrhoea (probably around 1500) a cunning woman told him to go and circle a rowan tree chanting ‘whikey tree, whikey tree, take away this flux from me ...”

“... Alexandrian rat (Rattus rattus alexandrinus), a subspecies of the black. In the intervening years, winter by winter – that being the season in which they’re forced to live in closest proximity – the brown rat has killed off the other two. The black and the roof rat, all but extinct in New York, have gone to Los ...”

“... a bay), William Baffin (who became an island) and Vitus Bering (who became a strait). He describes Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a billiard table on the sea-ice of Cambridge Bay. The table was fashioned from snow blocks, the cushions from walrus skin stuffed with ...”

“... Something is amiss with Robert Harbison’s sentences. They seem to consist almost wholly of last-minute additions. The way out of the impasse brought on by the decay of religion available to Wilson was an authorised version of Ruskin’s symbolic correspondence, authorised by duplicated evidence from the distant past excavated by science, and institutionalised by the artist in specific forms, like the Brighton chalice, also a calyx, a flower on its stem, attempting to work a magic which would inhere in a thing not just in one’s method for contemplating it ...”

“... roumaine (1940) hangs next to a mannequin dressed in an embroidered woollen blouse from the Autumn/Winter 1981 collection and a knee-length velvet skirt, which falls in heavy folds and is belted in the same material. Once the obvious likeness has been acknowledged, however, the effect is underwhelming. The mannequin is no match for Matisse. His subject has ...”

“... a journey through time and never came back, and the final battle (or life itself) was too much for Robert Downey Jr (Iron Man). The last scene but one is his funeral, and the last scene of all is a glimpse of an aged Chris Evans (Captain America), who has had better luck, and is living with his old sweetheart retrieved from the 1970s. On the soundtrack we hear ...”

“... migrate in ‘the run-up to Christmas’. Here I sit amidst the hubbub of the rue de Seine while a winter fly snores at a window-pane. Old existentialists, old beats, old punks sat here of old; some dedicated drunks still sing in the marketplace, and out the back there’s an old guy who knew Jack Kerouac. Spring in January now, of course: no doubt the daffs ...”

“... for the Yale Editions of his Private Papers. It opens two hundred years ago in London, during the winter of 1789. Frosty weather – the widower is warm against ‘the French insurrection’. Christmas Day takes him to church. Three years go by, and on the same day the same church receives him. ‘It vexed me that even on the festival of Christmas I was ...”

“... label round his neck now. Even in its time it contributed more to publicity than to enlightenment. Robert Conquest, as editor of the group’s anthology New Lines (1956), claimed that what the members had in common was a ‘negative determination to avoid bad principles’. What bad principles? It fell to Davie to define as well as to denounce these evils, or ...”

“... to illuminate their understanding of old familiar scenes. Among the professionals must be included Robert and Monica Beckinsale; among the self-confessed amateurs, Richard Muir. The Beckinsales – one native to the north Cots-wolds and the other to the Vale of the White Horse – present what is for them the English heartland. Richard Muir, nostalgic for the ...”

“... that a former propagandist should take their formal recitation of Leninist phrases at face value. Robert Service’s Lenin trilogy is a work of a very different kind. The final volume covering the period from the spring of 1918 to Lenin’s death has benefited from access to some of the sources used by Volkogonov, though far from all, which is a pity since ...”