“... Why this material instead of stainless steel? One reason – and I say this tentatively – may be that the softer glow of silver suggests something more noble, more ancient, than the steel Ray uses for human animals. If so, this is further support for the notion that shine can express something of the subject’s character. Yet in other instances, it ...”

“... The NDP, traditionally an outsider on the left of Canadian politics, got a bump in the polls last May when it took power in Alberta, a province that has voted Progressive Conservative for almost fifty years. Mulcair entered the campaign as favourite and, with his high poll numbers presumably made up mostly of Canada’s left, he made a reasonable strategic ...”

“... speech on 27 February as an assurance that ‘I’m more like Bernie Sanders than this contest may have made us seem.’ How long can she keep up the versatility unrebuked? Sanders gave a rough idea of what he means by ‘establishment’ in a debate on 12 February when he took up Hillary Clinton’s laudatory review of the latest book by Henry ...”

“... Yet here we are in 2016 and the mad Maoist remains a dominant figure in British politics. It may be that he holds something of our collective future in his hands. Where are Clegg, Laws and Alexander? Laws tells us that Gove liked to rib him by describing Alexander as ‘Luke Skywalker to my Obi-Wan Kenobi’. Oh how we laughed! This is just one more ...”

“... the caption reads: ‘The recent elder victim of an animal attack’. The Melody argues a society may be judged on its treatment of the disenfranchised, but the novel’s politics doesn’t distract from its portrayal of the protagonist. Busi’s is a commendable life, well-lived, and as a character he is conscious of his own flaws and shortcomings (he cannot ...”

“... for you will be shot down by arrows.’ A note in the exhibition suggests that the animal style may reflect a metaphysical view according to which there are three worlds: the world of birds, the world of humans and animals, and an underworld of monsters. But the exhibition says little more about Scythian myth, and whether or not the theory holds water it ...”

“... on display at the National Gallery’s small exhibition of his paintings (until 19 May), was previously catalogued as The Friends and Two Sisters, kidding absolutely nobody. These early works, heavy in innuendo and set in fashionable interiors, are far removed from the crowded Parisian street scenes that later became his stock in ...”

“... fruition in his solar discs and sunflowers. The exhibition demonstrates that while his handiwork may alter, Van Gogh’s will to perorate persists. ‘Starry Night’ (1888) It persists, but only rarely after that first drawing is the scope of the homily panoramic. We are not shown the wild bid at cosmic allegory that is the Starry Night now held in New ...”

“... more tolerant of snakes, and therefore of dracones, than their successors. Ogden suggests this may have been because they kept rat-snakes, or house-snakes, in order to kill the rodents attracted by grain stores. In Roman mythology, snakes were sometimes thought to be genii locorum, protective deities, and the base-form of Asclepius, the god of healing, was ...”

“... mind will stay: One is that if something’s worth saying, and sounds good once it’s said, you may just as well just say it twice, it costs no more or less; good once, better twice, go ahead. And the other was something McCarthy said, he said it by way of a goodbye. – Hurry back, boy, McCarthy said. Hurry back soon for a pat and good craic. But the very ...”

“... to persuade, easily persuadable. There’s no embarrassment about faddishness; in fact, there may be a shortage of embarrassment all round. This is the face of Austin painted by Richard Linklater, director of chatty warm-weather existentialist movies such as Slacker and Dazed and Confused. A short walk from my old home is a café-bar called the Spider ...”

“... stealthy in her originalism. When she – it will surely be a she – makes it to the court, she may well convince Roberts and Alito to join a solid majority bloc of five judges who will embark on a crusade against 20th-century constitutionalism. If 2005 turns out to be the decline before the fall, and American politics takes a more centrist turn, I suspect ...”

“... is ambiguous: the miners might be saved. There is no parallel reprieve for Alice, but others may find that, after all, they can manage. Early in the novel, a gun is fired, half in play, half in ignorance. This introduces the notion of Russian roulette, an image that recurs in Alice’s pill-box, ‘its segments like the chambers of a gun’, in a ...”

“... Israel, with Britain and the US, has always claimed: if a leader is democratically elected, he may and even should, wage war against peoples that don’t have democracy or strong armies, or weapons of mass destruction. Let’s see our ailing Refuseniks try to accuse our generals of war crimes now, just for uprooting a few thousand olive trees. Who except ...”

“... in the unclean process, and pulls about the encrusted carcase with a fervour of purpose which may be scientific, but which is nonetheless nasty in the extreme.’ As Luckhurst observes, ‘this report would surely have suggested that Pettigrew was cursed, if such an idea had been available.’ Something must have happened, then, between Pettigrew’s ...”