“... 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 ...”

“... but feel that quantum mechanics would soon have surfaced had any one of these men not lived. This may even be true of most of Einstein’s work, with the notable exception of the General Theory, which gave the explanation of gravity and showed that Newton’s achievement was not quite complete. So Professor Tolstoy is right, I think, in placing Maxwell next ...”

“... The telling of fantastic tales is, as I’ve remarked, a characteristic of the Joy men, and may remind us that Mr Carey also likes to do so. The Fat Man in History is now known, in its paperback version, as Exotic Pleasures, the title of one of the other stories. The fantasy in these tales is bolder and more successful than in the novel. One of them is ...”

“... Banse, who sought to penetrate ‘the soul of the country’. His reading of the English scene may add grist to the mill of Martin Wiener’s English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980, but that will certainly not detract from its appeal. While Richard Muir, an academic geographer turned freelance author, is writing for a popular ...”

“... Vietcong hide-out in the Southern capital. Many readers, while enjoying Burchett’s racy style, may be critical of his opinions; there are also errors of fact. During the negotiations between the North Vietnamese and the Americans in Paris, Burchett writes of a misunderstanding between the chief American negotiator, David Bruce, and Henry Kissinger, who had ...”

“... maid has lit a fire, And shut-out January relights desire. Don’t laugh; Childe Harold may be grey and paunchy, A lame, ex-English, ex-Scottish ex-Romantic Soon to be ex-everything, including ex-raunchy. But still I’ll have a gaudy night, not frantic Like forty years ago; and at dawn she ’ll re-tell, re-live, forgive each aging antic. All ...”

“... catalogue essay María Dolores Sánchez-Jáuregui suggests that the pair depicted standing nearby may be Sandys and Basset. Although her evidence is slight, if true the identification would have implications she does not discuss, since both pairs are placed in the groups that Zoffany depicts via some hefty nudges as homosexual. The presence of the ...”

“... a candidate in such a campaign; not of a struggle between parties but of a vote to decide who may become a party’s choice, centred on a Democratic primary in the state of Ohio. One of the candidates in this primary scarcely appears, and the other, played by George Clooney, who also directs the film, is mainly an object of dream and desire rather than a ...”

“... class and power, or rather class and power are full of such opportunities and yearnings, but we may lose the strangeness of the film if we use the names of things we think we know about. Fox hires Bogarde, and their relationship goes through a series of seasons rather than adding up to a plot. At first, things are quite proper, ideal from Fox’s ...”

“... to a provincial university, or studied chemistry: it’s because he doesn’t turn forty until May. Speaking for myself, I find the homogeneity grotesque – and I say that as a white man in his forties with an Oxford degree in the humanities. God only knows what the rest of the electorate thinks. The battle of competing narratives will largely come down ...”

“... had shouted at John Humphrys five times before breakfast, for several weeks in a row. (Humphrys in May 2003, told by his boss to read out Alastair Campbell’s insistence that the dodgy dossier wasn’t sexed up: ‘I can’t read this rubbish!’ That’s my Today programme.) But I barely know who to be angry at. The people who voted for Brexit have something ...”

“... is the parody Fox News banner running across the bottom of the credits: ‘Gender-fluid illegals may be entering the country twice.’ Many of the best lines are given to Tom, Shiv’s weak, sneaky, bullied-and-bullying husband. In one episode, the top executives of Waystar are on a corporate retreat in Hungary – or as Tom puts ...”

“... the bench: but each of these is a discrete task of rendering, applied to a rigid groundplan. Degas may have reciprocated the admiration of Gauguin, who in turn inspired Picasso, but in this regard those other artists (not to mention Cézanne) show greater mental energy. Every mark they make speaks to every other mark. Gauguin tends to pile up objects. He wants ...”

“... and image, and especially the vexed relay between written and photographic evidence. Loch Ness may seem a whimsical subject for an artist whose source material has recently included psychiatric reports on Nazi war criminals and interviews from the 1960s with Minimalist artists, but it’s worth considering the machinery of print and picture by which the ...”

“... a film begins in a basement and ends in the mountains, we know that a spatial metaphor or two may be in the offing – as in Bong Joon-ho’s earlier work The Snowpiercer (2013), where social classes are marked by their location (front and back) on a long train, and defined by a grim and nasty talk (given by Tilda Swinton with a Yorkshire accent) about ...”