“... Freedman from Herculaneum, nor the Dancing Satyr, nor possibly even the Riace bronzes; these may all be no more than public-space fillers made by journeyman blacksmiths. There is one exception, however, which arrives only in the final room, Room 10, devoted to ‘Heads’. Uncovered only in 2004 in Bulgaria, metres away from a royal tomb, it is a ...”

“... of sympathies and sensibilities in ways that empirical consensus doesn’t. In the long run, this may well come down to brute biology: if a lion could speak, it would, perhaps, be possible to converse with it about which empirical beliefs are true; but not, I think, about whether eating people is wrong. ‘C’est mon métier,’ says the lion, with a Gallic ...”

“... part of the reason for his success. His subject matter unavoidably raises the question of how we may speak about unspeakable atrocity. The mind can’t easily process the sheer number of those killed in the course of the Second World War. In such carnage, it’s impossible to imagine the totality, the presence, the surfeit of the lives lost. Yet it’s not ...”

“... as he seems to think it does, better than a writer who provides more conventional endings. Ridgway may give these thoughts to a character who’s a bit crazy, but there’s no getting away from the feeling that he agrees with them. Towards the end of Hawthorn & Child, a violent drifter is holed up in a house he’s broken into, the police are swarming around ...”

“... likenesses of living persons – began to appear in China about 2500 years ago. The tradition may be long, but the breadth and scale of the genre are even more striking, especially when portraiture is asked to perform broader duties than the depiction of people. The portrait of a continent is not the same as the portrait of a lady, say, and neither is a ...”

“... challenges. As his charisma balances his brother’s dutifulness, his departure from the firm may be a loss, perhaps even a danger, to the royal family.However, there is a question as to what sort of departure is viable, and what sort of freedom he can find. In renouncing the utilitarian contract between public funding and public service, Harry is also ...”

“... a firetrap in which everyone casually smokes. Julia’s TV career is in danger – her character may be killed off, a crime within a fiction within a crime fiction. Someone nearly drowns, and then someone else nearly drowns. Brodie sees a young hitchhiker with a unicorn backpack, and later finds a similar backpack washed up on the beach. ‘Jackson didn’t ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Dostoevsky went to inspect it: he was less persuaded that it was so humane. A prisoner may have had their own space, but that meant they lived in semi-solitary confinement. Pentonville was a holding pen: prisoners would soon be sent to other prisons or shipped to the other side of the world to see out their incarceration. I saw a form for a ...”

“... family, welfare state and mental-health services.Readers who are allergic to irony and archness may not be impressed – the book is so arch that you could drive a horse and carriage through it – but it provides a steady flow of good gags and is, in its way, satisfyingly resonant too. In its straightforward comic determination to please, The Adulterants ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... since the 1990s. It is one of the few sub-Saharan sites of exploration where valuable discoveries may still come to light. For European and North American curators, and their African protégés, the rewards are handsome. Sanlé Sory has turned out well in every sense. He reassures us that we can ascribe works in Africa to individuals, whether they’re ...”

“... ships into port; and even on the high and windswept Sheppey Crossing, where container lorries may struggle to reach the ‘reserve’ system proposed for the port of Sheerness. This is how the moral of Brenley Corner enters our time. It is a lot easier to rail against juggernauts and other inflated bogeys than to run a country properly, or even just a ...”

“... 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 ...”