“... the changing relationship of mother and child. Meanwhile the constant for Hiller is a typology she may well have been the first to reveal: who would have guessed that there was a time when all over Britain, photographers were poised to capture the explosive breaking of a wave? The actions behind the work of Kelly and Hiller seem private, even domestic. Yet ...”

“... endorse the accords and signal to Colombia that it must not let this opportunity slip away. Uribe may well try to spin things out while he gains political strength; if negotiations drag on, mid-level Farc commanders might lose faith in their leaders’ capacity to negotiate the deal, and in the government’s ability to guarantee its promises. The Farc could ...”

“... 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 State of Israel, one of its institutions, or an area under its control, in such a way that may cause economic, cultural or academic harm’ (the first such lawsuit was filed in January against two activists in New Zealand who had written an open letter that persuaded the singer Lorde to cancel a concert in Tel Aviv). In their ruling the Supreme Court ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... gave offence: ‘The right management of so nice and ticklish a business, wherein a little slip may spoil all, is not everyone’s talent.’ Just as bad were ‘frothy light discourses’ and ‘misbecoming wit’ about religious matters. In the 1670s and 1680s Locke supervised the education of Anthony Ashley Cooper, who later became the 3rd earl of ...”

“... splatters half-hides the evanescent drapery of her dress, as if to suggest that while such fabric may advertise an artist’s skill with colour, it’s less suited to practical work. Personified ‘Painting’ and the real female artist overlap in the essentials, but stubborn details prevent them from mapping precisely onto one another.On the table below the ...”

“... it hardly tries to be a catalogue – that accompanies the V&A’s Bags: Inside Out (reopening 17 May), bags get a desiccated write-up: a feeble foreword by Tristram Hunt, woolly captions, bland generalisations, brand worship. This doesn’t begin to do justice to the sometimes barmy bravura of what is on show. Emily Jo Gibbs’s horse chestnut bag ...”

“... father wasn’t one to make things like this up, so the commas must be there somewhere, and it may well be that he added some other punctuation: the odd full stop, perhaps even a semi-colon or colon. Indeed, in his marginal notes to the first edition of Heaney’s debut collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966), which Heaney inscribed to my parents with a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... proclaimed emperor before his father actually died, and that his mother, the Empress Eirene, may have preferred Anna’s husband to her own son. But no suggestion of a plot against John surfaces before the account of Niketas Choniates, who was born around the time Anna died. Choniates admits that, having poor sources, he relied on hearsay for the early ...”

“... the floor, she tells the doctor on the phone that if there’s no chance the boy will live, she may as well just hop in a cab to the clinic and save him the ambulance; when the paramedics get there and Levy says she might vomit, one of them asks if she’s drunk (‘No, I’m upset,’ she explains); on a stretcher at the clinic, hooked up to various ...”