“... camp to be a testament to something real for a black artist. Aspiration is a weird concept, but it means a hell of a lot to young people from nowhere, who feel they can get a little closer to Paris by buying a sweatshirt or a lipstick. Lagerfeld said he didn’t care about the commercial side – $11.1 billion sales in his last year at Chanel – but he cared ...”

“... In order to gain access to the basement, Stefan has to bribe the loathsome janitor, Brandt. This means stealing miniature bottles of aquavit brought back from his father’s last trip abroad; then concealing the thefts; lying to his family about his trips to the basement; inventing new lies to cover those lies, and so on. When, inevitably, the theft is ...”

“... might no longer want to be where he thought he was going. I don’t know whether Carruth regards David Lynch as an influence, but Lynch’s name kept coming into my mind as I tried to find a temporary shorthand for the effect of Upstream Colour. The characters are quiet, self-contained, even self-absorbed; they are consumed by a project they themselves do ...”

“... book being read, a chapter a day, by people as different as Stephen Fry, Tilda Swinton, even David Cameron, as well as ordinary folk. The Sea Inside is most at ease when, again, he is in the company of whales. Companionable and entertaining, the book follows the recent fashion for combining memoir, travelogue, historical byways, natural history and ...”

“... colour and sharp light, so that the whole thing looks mildly cartoon-like, often resembling, as David Denby says, hyperrealist painting. Or the way we imagined the 1960s when we thought they were still the 1950s. Larry Gopnik, played by Michael Stuhlbarg with a fine capacity for recurring surprise, as if he were Clark Kent who kept forgetting he had another ...”

“... The Battle of Cascina, was ordered from Michelangelo, then putting the final touches to his David. Among those involved in the commission was the civil servant and author Niccolò Machiavelli. After a year working on ideas – a cornucopia of sketches survives – and then on a full-size cartoon, Leonardo began painting in the Sala in early ...”

“... million came in only last Friday!’ Easy come, easy go. When the boss of the central bank, David Oddsson, and the finance minister, Arni Mathiesen, declared after nationalising Icesave that Iceland would not pay these debts – or, in Mathiesen’s version, might perhaps settle some part of them – the UK applied its anti-terrorist laws to freeze the ...”

“... the problem of Palestinian refugees; his desire to ‘get rid of the occupation, by any possible means and as quickly as possible’ – were driven by patriotism and a desire to see Israel thrive. But throughout his career, and especially in the McCarthyist Israel of the 21st century, there was little chance the regime would accept that anyone who ran ...”

“... involved’ with both his environment and other people. The term, Harrison explained, means ‘looking-at-each-other-hoping-that-either-will-offer-to-do-something-which-both-parties-desire-but-are-unwilling-to-do’. The last look that passes between Thelma and Louise, perhaps? Or the first? It’s a look familiar in playgrounds, as children ...”

“... died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus ...”

“... Alliance, when it was subsequently faced with ostensibly less intractable difficulties. Now that David Owen’s ‘continuing SDP’ has gone out of business, some gullible newspapers have written as though the party that was launched nine years ago had sunk with all hands aboard. In fact, of course, constitutionally and numerically, the real continuing SDP ...”

“... the articulation of the body remained (as Bernini’s work triumphantly demonstrated) the primary means of artistic expression. Even in a landscape, it was the figures that created significance. By making the principal protagonist of the Phocion landscapes invisible, and so constructing a narrative around the physical absence of its subject, Poussin was ...”

“... perhaps, to the cruel though well-meaning Poor Law of 1834. In top-and-tail essays Asa Briggs and David Donnison make what they can of a disparate assembly which ranges from Josephine Butler and Charles Booth to R.I. Morant and William Beveridge. As Donnison points out, equality was seldom their explicit goal. Nor was the growth of a centralised bureaucratic ...”

“... and modern educated spoken English in England tends to be a stilted class-ridden affair by means of which speakers strive to assert or to conceal their origins. (Perhaps the hope for British poetry ought to lie in regional speech, and of course in Ireland, Scotland and Wales.) One might even hazard as a fourth reason that the university scene into ...”

“... in Mogadishu but it doesn’t involve anything so prosaic as a cease in the firing. What it means in practice is no first use of artillery, a moratorium on heavy ordnance. It has not put an end to the shooting: thirty casualties a day are turning up at the couple of gamy hospitals in the city. Glancing through the rear windscreen, I see the Filipino ...”