“... would now comprise around 160 Alliance, 180 Labour and 280 Conservative MPs – and the new books by David Butler and Vernon Bogdanor would have vanished beneath a stampede of eager buyers. As things are, though the distorted election results have robbed them of some of their topicality, they will be very widely and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a sterile one. Space was static, empty, what you had between your ears or needed to eradicate by bridging; time – or perhaps history – was fluid, burgeoning, open-ended. For a Modernist writer like Bertolt Brecht change in itself is a good, just as for Samuel Johnson change was in itself an evil. Bad things were reified products; good things were ...”

“... one time the security forces had believed they could defeat the Provisional IRA, but the methods by which they sought to do so proved counter-productive. A police force drawn, for whatever reasons, from one side of the community only, and inevitably identifying with that side, could not command sufficient support, or even acceptance, on the other side to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... visit to England, in 1930, was to research a new topic: Englishness in art. For all its claims to be polemical, from the typographically ingenious dust-jacket inwards, Stylistic Cold Wars is little more than an architectural spat, based on the profound difference of temperament and experience between a giggly English prep school master turned poet and an ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the centre of attention. But it is a curious phenomenon even so: hundreds of people transfixed by the presence of an artist whose appearance is as distinct and as recognisable as his work. Self-portrait by Annibale Carracci (c.1575) Portrait of the Artist, an exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery (until 17 ...”

“... Until this week I had read no work written by G.M. Trevelyan since my schooldays. No Cambridge supervisor that I can recall ever recommended any of his books, and I have certainly never prescribed them to my own students. Like most people, I knew – or thought I knew – that he had defined social history as ‘history with the politics left out’, and that he was one of the chief stuffed carcasses in the mausoleum of Whig history ...”

“... too, but also excited. But then the patient is Jung’s, a disturbed woman not at all underplayed by Keira Knightley. The movie – David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton – opens with a view of her struggling against her captors in a ...”

“... Frankenstein’s real achievement was to create life – out of bits and pieces of dead bodies to be sure. In Scott’s movie a creature who looks not like Victor but an athletic version of his creature drinks a small carton of what appears to be chilli sauce, and bursts apart, spreading his DNA all over the ...”

“... Square was emblazoned with the words: ‘This is not a coup’. He didn’t say what else it might be, but soon enough others did. A second revolution, a ‘people’s coup’, a ‘re-colution’: terms coined to describe how the events felt to them, or perhaps to bridge the discomfiting gap between experience and reality. It’s not the first time a coup in ...”

“... Attempts to alter the government’s policy on tuition fees have failed. Dreamed up by Labour, then embraced by the new Coalition government, the proposed reforms triggered large student demonstrations, but these had no impact on any constituency of real influence either in the universities or in politics ...”