“... necessarily operated independently of substantial industrial change. Limited industrialisation may have caused a uniquely wide dissemination of consumer goods and attitudes in England, but again one needs to be careful. Too much of the evidence for lower-class consumerism cited by McKendrick is literary and too much is drawn from London. In many Northern ...”

“... point in these diaries that the continuously intimate conversations Khrushchev had with Micunovic may have been part of a design to convince the West that relations between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were much better than they really were. Refuting this, Khrushchev himself insists that they are simply part of his design to put things between the two ...”

“... An enormous amount of reading has been done, a vast number of persons interviewed. The reader may sometimes find himself wishing for a little less detail, but the writing is lucid, and a clear picture emerges both of the man and of the problems that he faced at different times in his short but highly charged career. On nearly all the issues Mr Williams ...”

“... calling it ‘an academic romance’, and an epigraph from Hawthorne adds that authors of romances may ‘claim a certain latitude, both as to ... fashion and material’, which would not be permitted to anyone professing to write a novel. And, with a touch of the professor, Lodge also directs our attention to Patricia Parker’s admirable book Inescapable ...”

“... I was always late to the party,’ Lin (who is Asian American) writes about Axis, ‘but in fact I may not have been invited.’But then we should never assume that the gay bar is a safe space by nature. In his chapter on The Apprentice in London’s East End, Lin discusses the gay skinheads and white nationalists who used to frequent the local pubs: violence ...”

“... Prospero threatens Caliban in The Tempest: ‘Urchins shall, for that vast of night that they may work, all exercise on thee.’ The sea urchin, then, takes its name from the hedgehog. Throughout history we have turned to the hedgehog: we have used them in our fables, and demanded that they cure us of our pains. In 1693 the physician William Salmon ...”

“... when it gets boring.’ But most of the film’s dialogue isn’t his; nor did he invent what may be its finest new technology, the so-called fame machine (machine à gloire), where the seats of a theatre are made to produce a persistent clapping sound as though filled by an enthusiastic audience. The film’s key themes are manipulation and ...”

“... are in some ways predictable: there is a room at Tate Britain given over to theatre, in which one may view Noël Coward’s monogrammed scarlet dressing gown and Oliver Messel’s designs for the 1959 film of Suddenly Last Summer. Style, poise, extravagance: these we might expect. (Consider Glyn Philpot’s 1935 painting of Glen Byam Shaw, who is playing ...”

“... This ‘abstract turn’ didn’t signal an abandonment of the personal. The geographic shapes may seem little more than formalist ciphers – Bowling has at times encouraged this reading – but they are images that linger like after-traces on the retina. Africa morphs into South America; Guyana lurks in a sea of colour. In Bartica ...”

“... complete with smart skirt and tie, and has an air of innocence that convinces us at once that she may be the most dangerous figure on the train. We don’t know what her mission is until late in the film but we are not surprised to learn she is the daughter of the arch-capo of this world, a Russian known as White Death, played by Michael Shannon.So what ...”

“... right. Language itself seems to be grinning at the truism that if you want to be the king you may have to kill the king. One of the most haunting features of the Macbeth story, very well caught in this version, is the failure of its main characters to be who they think they are. Macbeth is not the tough guy his kingship plan requires, and this makes him ...”

“... complacent cruelty are bad enough, but the pride and pleasure the owner takes in his method may be even worse. Perhaps he has seen The Great Dictator after ...”

“... scale, no matter how unlikely the assemblage of monuments, ruins and speculative reconstructions may be, they have, in his drawings, a cogency unavailable to less grounded fantasies. His heirs in this work are the designers of science fiction films. His illustration to Milton, Pandemonium, or Part of the High Capital of Satan and His Peers of 1805, gives ...”

“... and drawings (many from the V&A) can be seen at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 29 May. Space, even after the geometrical basis of perspective is mastered, comes in flavours which mirror changes of tone and feeling. When the arena established by the recession of marble paving, and arcades and walls at right angles to the picture plane becomes ...”

“... settled views, and this centennial survey by the Spanish curator Carmen Giménez (on until 14 May) does so beautifully. As befits an exhibition that will travel to Tate Modern and the Pompidou, its perspective is European, which freshens the work dramatically. American accounts of Smith tend to race through his long apprenticeship to European masters ...”