“... let us act as if we were/Dead already’; Woolf in 1936 summarised the personal mythology as ‘May, death, lads, Shropshire’; Orwell in 1940 listed ‘suicide, unhappy love, early death’; Forster in 1950 ticked off ‘the football and cherry trees, the poplars and glimmering weirs, the red coats, the darnel and the beer … the homesickness and ...”

“... vapours of the past. It is fastened by two rusty lockable latches, but there are no keys, so it may have to be prised open. I haven’t tried. It is very heavy and I loaded it into my car with difficulty. My mother, who was with me that day, was unusually quiet as I drove her home. She simply said: ‘If you open that suitcase you’ll never close it ...”

“... here, as always, implies more than just a standard that is typical. What is not typical may be exceptional, and so better than it; but what is not ‘normal’ is infallibly worse than it – abnormal or subnormal. The call for Italy to become a normal country expresses a longing to resemble others who are superior to it. The full list of the ...”

“... out) they are in operation.There are also two romances in play. The first is industrial: these may be the last merchant ships the Clyde ever builds and therefore ‘ane end o’ ane auld sang’ in the phrase used to describe the end of Scottish sovereignty in 1707. The second is Hebridean: the fifty inhabited islands that make their ragged pattern off the ...”

“... except its covers. Starobinski has provided an introduction to the English translation that may be intended to reduce the sense of scatter, but I don’t think it succeeds. It does, however, provide quotable examples of his sometimes overheated style. On Ulysses listening to the minstrel Demodocos sing of his (Ulysses’) exploits: ‘In opposition to ...”

“... but it has the colour of the music hall or the circus, and it is haunted by the funeral it may seem to announce. Petit’s American exploit is a cultural crossing: danger in New York as a kind of French gaiety. Petit’s friends and helpers, interviewed on film, both confirm and trouble this view. They are all older, of course, proud of Petit, proud of ...”

“... chieftain and his even more awesome priestess wife, complete with jealous would-be son-in-law, may look like extras from every tribal encounter you have known Westerners to simulate, whether in a fictional Africa or America or Australia – or even New Zealand, where much of the film was shot – but their planet itself is an elaborate neural network of ...”

“... two decades, and the retreat from avant-garde adventures (he had experimented with Pointillism), may have been a result. When he returned to painting in the last decades of his life he reverted to the Impressionism of his youth. Adjacent rooms that contain the Ashmolean’s collection of Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Sickerts and Camden Town ...”

“... nor ever will, though the whole point is to know why one is walking, the answer to which, if I may repeat myself, is that it is a matter of curiosity walking as I do, for example right now on the Day of the Dead, because the Day of the Dead is something that greatly interests me. Every Day of the Dead is different from the one before and I wouldn’t miss ...”

“... Ways, which had been impounded after being used by the people traffickers. Although the refugees may not have owned superyachts, they probably not so long ago enjoyed expensive holidays in places like Symi. Neurologists, international lawyers, bankers and judges were among those forced to sleep (the sexes unsegregated) on the concrete terrace of the police ...”

“... even if it’s not in the bag – that’s given Wyatt’s music the consistency of an oeuvre. It may also explain why his accident, which should have produced a hiatus, resulted instead in an album that picks up a lot of threads from his days with the Soft Machine and Matching Mole, while anticipating the music he went on to make. So even if Rock Bottom ...”

“... recognised by agreement with the estate of Kazimir Malevich in 2008’ – which may be one reason the show is so comprehensive. Born into a Polish family in Kiev in 1879, Malevich learned to paint in his teens, though nothing seems to remain from that time (so there is at least one Malevich we can’t now see). His first exhibition was in ...”

“... is £4 divided by £200: 0.02, or 2 per cent per year. Taken in isolation, 2 per cent annually may not sound a lot, but costs at that level can have a substantial impact on both the cumulative returns that savers receive and the amounts borrowers pay. The cost of financial intermediation resembles a tax on the rest of the economy, slowing its growth ...”

“... character sings in The Threepenny Opera. His hypocrisy is unmistakable, but the ironic implication may also be right. We don’t all want to be human, even if it’s possible. We have other ambitions. Still, the relevant characters in the singer’s world and in ours are human in the standard, technical sense, even if some are fictional. What happens when ...”

“... with the US government has been critical in the case against Chapo. ‘A kilogram of cocaine may have a wholesale value of $18,000 in Guadalajara, Mexico,’ Margarito Flores said in a grand jury statement, ‘but that same kilogram would have a wholesale market value of $30,000 in Chicago.’ Between 2006 and 2008, the brothers were selling roughly $60 ...”