“... for its single storyline not to go off the rails. In this case an absurd plot (all murder plots may be absurd, but some are more absurd than others), set in decidedly unabsurd Hebden Bridge, is filled in with graphically threatened violence, and often enough the acts themselves. A mousey accountant gets his own back on his boss who refuses him a raise to ...”

“... expectations, condemned to repeat the story that brought them to its attention. Their work may have the comforting assurance of repeated ritual, but it loses energy, and though it’s not the transgressors’ fault when their line in outrageous blasphemy becomes all the rage, it defangs their bite. The friezes of silhouettes in this show are Walker’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an image of evil as it does of innocence. As Kael says of the governess, ‘in her idealism, she may expect children to be so innocent that she regards actual children as corrupt.’ We are not at all far from The Exorcist, where our fantasies require us to prefer possession by the devil to a child’s growing up and learning to ...”

“... In 2012, the SNP government announced that it was setting up a Land Reform Review Group. Last May it presented its proposals. These included transparency. In Scotland – as the sale of the Cluny estate showed – it’s still not always known who owns what. The ownership of huge tracts of Highland land is obscured by shady offshore accounts and secretive ...”

“... at all, she’s too ironic and alert, and the script does give her character some ambiguity: she may really love the victim more than she loves the man who owns her, as the boss’s assistant phrases it. But then she loves wealth and security more than anything. There’s something weirdly sensible about this, particularly where so much mystery surrounds ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... padded chair that, much like this country, isn’t quite as comfortable as it looks’. ‘This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man,’ he says, but I’ve never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards. Never snuck into the movies or failed to give back the extra change to a drugstore cashier indifferent to the ways of ...”

“... to clear up. The same could be said of Rudd’s legacy to the Australian Labor Party. Narcissism may be a self-referential condition, but it ensnares an awful lot of people in its sticky ...”

“... aren’t Swiss hoteliers, don’t have franc-denominated mortgages, and don’t gamble on forex, may not feel too bothered about all this. The trouble with the Olympian perspective concerns the underlying reason for the SNB’s sudden move. It seems that the central bank abandoned its currency peg because it didn’t feel it could defend it any more in the ...”

“... the Grace. Weeks beforehand I was summoned to Kostas’s office and asked about her visit. ‘She may want Dr Pepper,’ I said. A six-pack was despatched from Athens. We agreed against having the Herald Tribune delivered to her room in the morning; Isis was making major gains. The staff looked forward to her visit though few knew exactly what she did. The ...”

“... There’s nothing like winning, or converting a loss into a heroic and magnificent defeat, which may be winning’s equal, or its better. It’s quite the achievement of the Artist and Empire show that it conveys what so many imperial pictures originally wished to convey: the dazzle of it all, the lording it, the flashiness, the hubris, the benevolence of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Iceland is the equal of England in Eckersberg ownership, as well as its superior in football. This may make Eckersberg sound as if he was anxiously peripatetic in manner; the Paris show reveals him to be always securely himself, yet frequently on the move. He was also progressive: on his return to Denmark, he became one of the first professors in Europe to ...”

“... 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 ...”