“... when I was first irritated by that children’s rhyme, which is wrong twice over. Oil painting may well be hard but in some ways it’s easier than painting in watercolour, and watercolours are often more beautiful. However, the prejudice the rhyme encapsulates does arise from real differences. A typical oil painting is an object, a substantial piece of ...”

“... in Poets’ Corner is an image of a national bard. Roubiliac’s version was commissioned by David Garrick, who posed for it himself and while this was certainly vain of him, it was not as vain as it would be today. At a time when the play, rather than the biography, was the thing, Garrick was not unjustified in seeing himself as the embodiment of ...”

“... And so to Ernest Hemingway, whose adventures recorded by the military historian Nicholas Reynolds may not admit such subtlety. Reynolds is a former curator of the CIA Museum in Washington. Reasonably, the museum is a bit cagey and I am not very familiar with it but, one way and another, the collection has received quite a boost of late. In Hemingway’s ...”

“... as superficial. Nothing, as Wilde added, is more superficial than thought. For women, who may be assaulted, imprisoned or killed because of what they do or do not wear, clothes may be a matter of life or death. Anne Higonnet’s new book is somewhat belied by its subtitle, which plays to the idea of fashion as ...”

“... a bus station with its satellite café. When the bus station was demolished, the café failed. David Mills, the Owl Man of Albion Drive, fenced the site, built hutches for his birds and excavated a carp pool. For years, nobody cared. He had, like so many others in this borough, slipped into a crack between worlds. If the council acknowledged his existence ...”

“... insanely cool new search engine, wanted to incorporate it as a company, and needed to find a name. David Vise, in his breezy book The Google Story, tells how they came up with one. A fellow graduate student suggested to Page and Brin that they use the name given to what is sometimes, erroneously or metaphorically, called the largest number, 10100: google. They ...”

“... mother of Solomon, and finally as J, mistress of the sublime and the uncanny as well as of King David. In this new book Bloom cheerfully accepts the reviewer’s proposal. That the author of what eventually became the Torah should have been the relict of the unlucky Uriah, and not an Israelite, but a Hittite, was plainly irresistible. Henceforth, he ...”

“... of Sartre and Raymond Aron, future historians of French intellectuals in the Eighties and Nineties may well be condemned to structuring their narratives around the post-Marx brothers of French intellectual life, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. This is not a case simply of contemporary thinkers being dwarfed by the giants of the past – the ...”

“... Why ‘earthlings’​ ? David Miller isn’t drawing a contrast with justice for creatures from outer space. Nor is he taking issue directly with Ronald Dworkin’s ‘justice for hedgehogs’ in Dworkin’s book of 2011 with that title, although Miller does say in a footnote that he disagrees with him. He has in his sights the ‘neo-Augustinians’, as he calls them, like the late G ...”

“... then necessarily the continuing internal conflict, can be seen as interconnected. Such a theory may now be in sight. Its basis is the progressive unification of economics and ecology. It is not industrial production as such which has led to these major contradictions. That is the weakest side of the ecology movement, which has correctly identified current ...”

“... were paid for by his brother-in-law John T. Milliken, who had married Patrick’s beautiful sister May. Milliken had telegraphed Patrick’s counsel at the beginning of the case: ‘One million dollars, if necessary, for Patrick’s legitimate defence.’ As the case wore on and the defence case became clearer more and more people were willing to testify that ...”

“... bombings – Hamas’s absence from the Bush Administration’s most-wanted list of terrorists may have been politically expedient, but it gave Israelis little reassurance. During the long conflict with the Palestinians, Jews in Israel haven’t become inured to fear. But the fear isn’t all on one side. As Bayfield reminded the audience, ‘terror takes ...”

“... negotiator, said the two sides were ‘still far away’ from an agreement; his UK counterpart, David Frost, admitted there were ‘considerable gaps’. Barnier’s gloomy forecast was that a trade deal was now ‘unlikely’. Barnier hasn’t sounded positive about any of the negotiations he has been involved in since the referendum. The two sides talk ...”

“... in responding to the challenge. Writing in the last issue of this review, the American philosopher David Hoy gives courteous attention to Hartman’s redemptive strategy. But he remains sceptical about Derrida’s influence and, in the last resort, dismissive of his claims. For him, Derrida practises a ‘recognisable genre’, that of bringing philosophy to ...”

“... a value on titles,’ he purred, ‘and I go with the great stream of life.’ Another member was David Garrick, who grew up alongside Johnson in provincial Lichfield, and shot to prominence in his twenties for the revolutionary naturalism of his acting style, notably his startling performance as Richard III. Garrick was elected to the Club in 1773; the ...”