“... regularly take questions at the bar of the House (a white line on the floor beyond which visitors may not pass while the House is in session). The most recent precedent for a member of the Lords appearing at the bar is not a close one. The Duke of Wellington appeared there in 1814 to give MPs an account of his campaign in the Peninsular War. Wellington was ...”

“... at higher temperatures to produce a stronger, whiter and even translucent effect. The merchants may have spent a year or more at a Chinese port acquiring their cargo: almost sixty thousand separate items made in Hunan province were recovered, more than 90 per cent of them painted and decorated bowls piled up and protected by straw, or layered in stacked ...”

“... 77 (Berryman again!) of the sometimes baffling and obscurely motivated Trilce (1922), where a word may be broken across a line-ending, or cascade down several lines. His earlier poetry has both family and God, at least in the form of blasphemy (his parents apparently hoped he might become a priest), but after about 1920 there is not much of either. The poems ...”

“... is for reining it in.Screwball actors work with and against our impressions of them. The Lady Eve may be the slyest of these films because it’s about the ways in which conforming to type condemns you. Henry Fonda appears as a naive herpetologist who has no chance against Stanwyck’s slippery con artist. The expected scenes of humiliation – like Grant in ...”

“... I’m not sure life is a dream. But if your attempts to map it don’t feel like one, you may be making a serious error about what being awake actually is, or where and in what conditions it is carried out.Harrison’s novels enact dreamy puzzling-through at every level. They dispense with much of the usual narrative infrastructure: linear ...”

“... you desire a copy to be sent to you,please fill up the,’ and so on. This was early May. The idea that they planned, within a couple of months, to issue ‘a pamphlet containing two short stories’ seems wildly optimistic. Virginia hadn’t even started writing hers.Nonetheless, Two Stories appeared in July, and sold out its run of 134 almost ...”

“... hadn’t been part of the original trial because Dunne wasn’t thought a reliable witness).In May last year, two months before Plummer’s final exoneration, the court dealt with the longest-serving victim of a miscarriage of justice that I’ve come across. Peter Sullivan spent 38 years in prison after being convicted in 1987 for the rape and murder of ...”

“... but disappears. The Chelsea girl, by contrast, seems to spring out of her boots and apron.Whistler may well have had another painter in mind when he chose to present The Chelsea Girl to the Cassatts. Childhood had already become Mary Cassatt’s great theme. Would The Chelsea Girl hang in view of one of her mother and child paintings back in America? Those ...”

“... surrounding the figure of Leonardo today, he perhaps exaggerates the difference. Whatever else it may involve, art history is about providing attributions for works of art, an activity largely invented in the late 19th century with the emergence of connoisseurs, who claimed to possess a gift for identifying authorship. This activity had traditionally been ...”

“... first condom in the loo,’ she said to her husband, ‘and she’ll soon change her tune.’ It may be that Mrs Donaldson was lucky but the two students sent to her by the university lodgings syndicate were in every respect but one not to be faulted. They were neat, quiet and they cleaned the bath and flushed the toilet and were so altogether discreet Mrs ...”

“... of the institution. The government’s hope that education will be tailored to individual needs may be a vain one but that is certainly these schools’ ambition. A very close eye is kept on students’ progress, which is constantly measured against presumed norms. Those who do well are publicly recognised: photos of ‘improvers of the month’ are hung on ...”

“... left the paper early in 1935, to prepare for an exam that would further his teaching career, in May the Pavese home was raided by police, who found an incriminating letter from an imprisoned anti-Fascist. Pavese did not explain that the letter was in fact meant for his girlfriend, a more determined revolutionary, Tina Pizzardo. He was condemned to three ...”

“... by a pair of twins, figments of each other’s imagination; as a series of texts whose authorship may never be reliably established. This short novel caused a big stir. ‘Pamuk in his dispassionate intelligence and arabesques of introspection suggests Proust,’ John Updike wrote in the New Yorker, while the New York Times Book Review announced that ‘a new ...”

“... estimate for the same period, but still a shocking number of victims. The violence in Congo may seem unintelligible but its roots lie in institutional practices introduced under colonialism, which 50 years of independence have only exacerbated. At their heart is an institution known as the native authority. Since the colonial period, native authorities ...”

“... magicians vilified for their worship of fire in The Arabian Nights, whose characteristic turbans may be an origin of the wizard’s hat in children’s books. Lorck likes treating the human subject as a form equal in interest to a building or some other inanimate object, and such juxtapositions run throughout his work. When I saw the print I found the ...”