“... in front of the dome, pillars and banner. Perhaps it is also a vigil for the occupation, which may well be over by the time you read this. By the entrance to the occupied Jeremy Bentham Room are the remains of an earlier vigil, all melted candles and wilting roses, Diana-like, with slogans among the tea lights: ‘Cedric Diggory Was Murdered,’ ‘Albus ...”

“... has projected its forces beyond its borders, in Darfur, CAR and Mali, only to discover that they may soon have to be deployed at ...”

“... take anything home … But the fffs are drawn out too richly to be explained by that alone. Vidal may fuck boys but by God he fffucks and Henry James did too. Vidal is not just convinced that James liked boys. He’s convinced he fucked them. Listening to this point hammered home the third time I thought how much this means to Vidal, and how perfectly his own ...”

“... remained strangely ‘un-churched’. He wasn’t baptised until he was on his deathbed and may never have attended a service in a Christian church. But he gave the Christians what they wanted: he ensured that Christianity would no longer be ‘shunted aside as “un-Roman” or the practice of eccentrics’. Christians weren’t ...”

“... and vegetables. His father and Gage oversaw his exhumation. Of all Gage’s observations it may be the thorny hedge, which like the garden and the nearby wood, have disappeared, rather than the careful notes on art and local customs, that is of most use to history. One aim of the excavation at Hougoumont is to work out why the French with their vastly ...”

“... At college he was a maths whiz, and his readily provided assistance with calculus assignments may explain his friends’ loyalty, because he’s a vacuum of charisma. Yanagihara ostentatiously withholds information about Jude’s condition, deploying phrases like ‘those years’ and ‘what happened then’, along with creepy references to a Brother ...”

“... too, in her use of timings. It’s OK, apparently, to make events that occurred in the month of May 1962 happen, after all, in 1982. She doesn’t explain very clearly. The 1980s have their own problems, their own pleasures; decades have their own time and feel. But for Doris, not wanting to hurt feelings or wanting events to make more sense for her ...”

“... the Thames. On the Hudson the new Whitney Museum, conceived by Renzo Piano, will open its doors in May. Guided by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the Museum of Modern Art is planning another expansion (the last one was just ten years ago), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art will transform its modern wing by the end of the decade. I draw these examples from London ...”

“... on women against their better instincts, leading to a ‘cascade of intervention’ that may be damaging for ‘baby’. But when I went into labour and arrived at hospital, late on a Sunday night and in serious pain, a midwife told me to go home and come back when labour was properly ‘established’. There were no doctors to be seen. When I came ...”

“... Tsing believes, that don’t just include people: ‘multi-species storytelling’, she claims, may kickstart the revolution that is needed to make sense of ‘the world that progress has left to us’. Matsutake, with ‘its willingness to emerge in blasted landscapes’, allows us ‘to explore the ruin that has become our collective home’. This is the ...”

“... evidence seems to contradict the model. In other words, Acton’s competitive advantage theory may have been useful for him to think with, but the Athens he describes in the specialised language his model requires could have been described and understood just as well without it. Laborious, and more than a little otiose, the assumed timelessness of the ...”

“... what’s the use,’ in a few weeks writes a novel instead, and never looks back. It may all sound a little apocryphal or parabolic, but the novel was Frost, written in 1963, and in 2006 I translated it for Janeway. She described it (the commission, not the translation) as being from the ‘Achduschreck!’ – which I might translate as the ...”

“... the money machines, the America’s Cup, and, of course, the ocean would still be here. It may be stretching a point but could the return of the trusting cahows, who befriended those early mariners and were then killed out of hand, be seen as a good omen for Bermuda? And, by extension, for all of us? It is now the island’s national bird. It is being ...”

“... bone’, ‘snuffed out Rachel Plummer’s infant/(nursing was lost time)’. But for the poet it may not be too late. Her son’s hair has ‘grown for the better part/ – a thousand pardons – of a year’, his ‘leonine’ locks raised, we suppose, in one kind of captivity. Submitting them to the barber’s shears means surrendering him to another ...”

“... Don​ McCullin’s retrospective at Tate Britain (until 6 May) is proof that it pays for a photojournalist covering victims of conflict and hardship to get up close: not quite eyeball to eyeball, but near enough to suggest a portrait. Most of McCullin’s photographs ask us to look frankly at the human face, and often our gaze is reciprocated ...”