“... like poor Richard Dawkins, who was only trying to disprove the existence of God, and – though he may not know it – is now and for ever fighting the fight of the ...”

“... the waves of the poem’s rhythm are long, which makes excerpting quotations difficult, but this may still give a flavour of what I mean about the phenomenology of reading it. When Sutherland writes, ‘There was a desk or table here in what despite the space from which closeness had been torn out but was still streaming away,’ the complexity of the very ...”

“... and floor-length dresses and gentlemen in full fig and they died laughing. The audiences may have thought that, in time-honoured fashion, they were laughing at their fathers; Roth understood that what they were actually laughing at was peace. ‘We knew that once we had the pleureuse, the steel helmet was only a matter of time, that there’s a ...”

“... was up at the mountain, or heading that way. The spring climbing season is confined to April and May, before the monsoon, but even then the opportunities for high-altitude climbing can be very few. To make a bid for the summit, you need the jet stream to drop – or you risk being blown off the mountain. If the weather is poor and no one can move, base camp ...”

“... like Still Life on Car Roof. But it’s the portraits of old men I’ll most remember. It may be worth noting that Cunningham, Hamburger and Twombly each died shortly after Dean filmed them. This isn’t voodoo. It’s just her special instinct: she is always there to catch the thing before it ...”

“... political office, Baxtiyar Kawani, admitted that the referendum had confounded the PUK. ‘It may be a masterstroke by Barzani,’ Kawani said. ‘He is a good man but he is also a politician and it is not right the way he has clung on to the presidency.’The Barzani family has been at the centre of Kurdish resistance to the Iraqi state since the ...”

“... the era of apartheid. This tremendous body of work is now on view at the Pompidou Centre (until 13 May). The show also includes more recent studies under the heading ‘structures of domination and democracy’: anything from wooden garbage-collectors’ carts and bleak miners’ hostels to churches and public monuments, built during and after ...”

“... said, ‘people are prosecuted for obstructing justice’ without an underlying crime – they may have obstructed ‘to avoid embarrassment’, for example, or ‘to avoid harm to their business’. He also found it odd that Mueller had merely laid out the evidence on both sides concerning obstruction: he was charged with making a decision and the whole ...”

“... at the old ‘push and pull’ religion. These canvases too are at the Barbican. They may not be Krasner at her best, but they are deeply touching; and their mixture of ferocity and nostalgia, homage to Cubism and impatience at any attempt to turn the style into a ‘method’, led throughout her life to the beauty she ...”

“... Love that caused Jeffrey Epstein to put her number into his book?’ I will now ask myself. It may be quite innocent: perhaps he got her number from somebody else; perhaps he asked her to a fundraiser; maybe she met him once and didn’t notice that the three girls behind him were 14 years old. The same question could be raised in relation to another ...”

“... word ‘soon’ catches hold of him. It begins with months, he can’t imagine them. ‘January, May, December! Nothing!’ That sense jumps onto the places, some he can sense, others he can’t. Lvov, he feels, he will see again, Nikopol not, even Cernauti not, barely thirty miles behind Lvov. Psycho-geo-mathematically, he is zeroing in on his own death. On ...”

“... in New Guinea. ‘Nature seems to have taken every precaution that these, her choicest treasures, may not lose value by being too easily obtained,’ Alfred Russel Wallace wrote in 1862. New Guinea’s birdlife is not a secret the island has locked away in its forests, however, but a gift it has spread around the world. According to The Largest Avian ...”

“... In​ the first room of the new Fabergé exhibition at the V&A (until 8 May), there is a display case containing a pinkish columnar table-portrait of Tsar Nicholas II. It is made of variegated gold, in laurels and garlands, with a gold double-headed eagle on top and a gold frame, accommodating more huge diamonds than one would think permissible or even possible, encircling a vague-looking Nicholas and culminating in a crown ...”

“... and their reactions range from bewildered irritation to dismay. While the idea of being godlike may be attractive, being an actual god is less so. One is at the mercy of one’s worshippers, who tend to be demanding, dictatorial and impossible to shake off. Anna Della Subin’s Accidental Gods is a philosophical and historical exploration of the phenomenon ...”

“... to appeal to readers in this country. Too South African? While I understand why this charge may be made against the book – however wrongheadedly – I also suspect it to be a cover for another, contradictory source of dissatisfaction with it: namely, that it was not South African enough. On that subject, more below. First, however, I must make clear ...”