“... siege in his headquarters in Ramallah. When Ariel Sharon, the then prime minister, announced in May 2003 that there were plans to ‘take care of Arafat’, Avnery and other activists made their way to the West Bank to sit outside Arafat’s door. Arafat survived the night, but died a year later; Avnery never hid his belief that he had been poisoned, on the ...”

“... on the girl’s skirt and the stripes on the boy’s jacket are frantically busy; the figures may be fixed, doll-like, but things whirl chaotically, noisily around them. There’s prettiness, domesticity and decoration in Cooke’s work, but at the same time an interest in abstraction. She could be masterful in her use of space and colour to create and ...”

“... a premier coup is intended as a work of art in its own right. Executed in a single sitting, it may share the unfinished properties of a preparatory study, but must succeed or fail on its own terms. The time constraint is crucial because it forces the painter to make a series of rapid decisions on the basis of observation and perceptual ...”

“... raises the price for everyone. The richest countries are forced to pay more; the poorest countries may have to go without.Some of the hike in the price of gas is the result of industrial economies ramping up production as the world part overcomes, part assimilates the pandemic. Some of it is a consequence of catch-ups on coronavirus-delayed maintenance. But ...”

“... both rocks their case foundered.It did so because the hearing, which was spread over three days in May 1960, attracted news coverage which came to the notice of a number of former regimental pipers. From what Penny told me years ago, and from what I recently learned from Gerald Pointon (a graduate in music and law, then the newly hired articled clerk to the ...”

“... place in a floating world informed by ‘something suggestive of Japan’. ‘However much I may admire a piece of literary work,’ he said, ‘the moment I am about to illustrate it I am seized with an instinctive loathing to the cause of my woe.’ While slogging away on Le Morte d’Arthur he gave vent to his feelings in a series of Bons Mots, small ...”

“... the High Court to accept that ‘some element of choice is … open to refugees as to where they may properly claim asylum.’ But Betts and Collier’s message was welcomed by governments of rich countries like the UK. As the Institute of Race Relations (of which I’m vice chair) reported in November, the securitisation of the Channel crossing has led ...”

“... better. Both sittings were late at night. Yiddish had won recognition by stealth. Its diminishment may not be permanent, however. As the vernacular language of much of the orthodox Haredi community, Yiddish still has prominence both among the diaspora and in Israel. As the expression of a pan-European Jewish cultural heritage, existing in multiple forms and ...”

“... to find they are indeed a thing: typically ex-offenders ostensibly on rehabilitation schemes, who may legitimately sell door-to-door but can also be – I read in the Nottingham Post from September 2020 – joint-casing burglars or their abetters. Some, it’s alleged, even sniff banknotes they receive for hints of mustiness – a sign that more might be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the now missing object, even if her chairs specifically do nothing to conjure the people who may once have sat on them. At the entrance to the exhibition, in an anteroom dedicated to Whiteread’s various public commissions (plans for her inverted resin cast of the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, a model of her Holocaust memorial in Vienna), there’s ...”

“... silence is to protect their careers, but others’ silence is the fear of hypocrisy, knowing they may be guilty of something similar. It’s time to redistribute some of the shame and responsibility women feel around this. It belongs to those men, and their silent friends. Because if, as a boyfriend once put it to me – ‘status is to women what beauty is ...”

“... when you begin to look at them properly that they seem stranded, shipwrecked by history. ‘Age may not weary them,’ Geoff Dyer has written of the army of bronze soldiers on permanent guard at First World War memorials, ‘but … powerless to protect themselves, their only defence, like that of the blind, is our respect.’ Putting aside, for a ...”

“... commission, this time for the British, soon followed. A Battery Shelled Life, Art, War may be the Imperial War Museum’s attempt to make amends for the fact that Lewis’s war commissions were suppressed for so long: neither A Canadian Gun-Pit (1918) nor A Battery Shelled (1919), both extraordinary paintings, were popular with the bodies which ...”

“... of instability, movement, pressure – something approaching synaptic assault, a feeling that may seem familiar to anyone who has spent time in Midtown or Lower Manhattan during working hours. This effect is amplified by the proliferation of reflections and refractions from the windows of the moving trains. Another tendency both poets share, and which ...”