“... In the United States, bestselling works of what is now called literary fiction tend to be aggressively regional – think of Jane Smiley’s Iowa, Jane Hamilton’s Midwest or E. Annie Proulx’s Newfoundland. They are literary postcards, nostalgic, often mawkish renderings of some quaint locale. Fulsomely praised as ‘generous’, ‘lyrical’, ‘redemptive’ and ‘luminous’, less Dirty Realism than stonewashed romanticism, they usually extol smalltown America, preferably the sort of place that’s pastoral and virtuous but in which one could still find a level of sophistication and a multiplicity of endearing eccentrics ...”

“... In a preliminary chapter called ‘Curriculum Vitae’ David Sylvester explains that he became interested in art when, at 17, he was fascinated by a black and white reproduction of a Matisse. He at once began to paint in oils, but soon discovered that he lacked talent and began to write about art instead, devoting himself thenceforth to the black and white of the page ...”

“... when she died at the age of seventy was unusual: a library of several hundred books, dominated not by the standard theological works of the time but by an unmatched collection of what we would now call English literature. The most spectacular instance is the only surviving first edition of Shakespeare’s Venus and ...”

“... Mme de Staël associated it with the misty, melancholy North and declared Romanticism to be primarily an effect of climate. Victor Hugo and his followers allied it to the vanished monarchy, then to the departed Napoleon, and finally to ‘liberalism in art’. Stendhal and Baudelaire produced more durable definitions ...”

“... In his trawl of anthropological data, historical records, literature and letters, art and music, David Gilmore finds that men have always and everywhere expressed fear, disgust and hatred of women. From the peaceful and gentle !Kung San Bushmen to the urbane and civilised Montaigne, from folk legend to Freudian complex, from Medusa to the Blue Angel, men ...”

“... or derision. He entirely eluded the notice of the Earl of Clarendon in the 17th century and of David Hume in the 18th. Even the Jacobin William Godwin, the first champion of the Civil War radicals, judged his exploits ‘scarcely worthy to be recorded’, and S.R. Gardiner’s comprehensive history of the Commonwealth ...”

“... among us considers what is signed over when we click ‘I agree’? This problem is not taken up by the Swiss art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in his brief account of his formation as an Ausstellungsmacher, and it is no more than touched on by the Canadian art critic David Balzer in his ...”

“... two days. Then I bought and read in a similar manner – none took me any longer than two days – David Szalay’s three previous novels: London and the South-East (one of the great mocking titles, up there with Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, or Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration), The Innocent and Spring. I want to say that here is a ...”

“... Thirty years ago, the campus novels of David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury mythologised a setting that expressed, better than any other, the cultural and ideological chaos of the 1960s and 1970s. The main characters were rarely students, but all the energy in these comedies of social transition flowed from the young: it was their politics and their sexuality that the generations above them were forced to flatter or fight, exploit or succumb to ...”

“... most generous Israelis have ever made them. It’s a familiar scene. The various memoirs produced by the major players in the Oslo Accord suggest that much the same sort of thing was said there, while leaks from the Camp David summit in 2000 describe similar exchanges between Clinton, Barak and Arafat. In fact, the Israeli ...”

“... worth reading (and if a modern, scholarly edition of his classic isn’t in production, it should be) is that in these islands the narrow vision he castigated has proved to be an enduring one. ‘British History’ is still generally understood and carried out here as though it were concerned only with domestic ...”

“... a majority of the miners had gone back to work over the preceding months, disillusioned, scared by the violence, or starved back (miners got little strike pay and no state help, since it wasn’t held by the courts to be an ‘official’ strike). Both books agree that Margaret ...”

“... Giacomettis and Calders in the seminal 1936 show Abstract and Concrete – was struggling to get by. His pictures weren’t really selling, and he was living on the £3 10s a week he still got from his mother. He was 35. Eager for extra income, he took over from Anthony Blunt as the art critic at the Spectator. And he also took on work for the Ministry of ...”

“... the proper distribution of power between Parliament and the executive? It’s a question raised by the recent High Court decision in Miller v. The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. Under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, a member state must ‘notify the European Council of its intention’ to leave, commencing a two-year period of ...”

“... my ambition is to weld the two of us into a new combined existence that will not only be able to withstand the shocks directed at us but will also have a positive existence for the good.’ And yet, back in the real world, he couldn’t let his children have his name (they wouldn’t allow him to), he couldn’t keep his family in the home he had ...”