“... Charterhouse of Parma’ appears in a few sentences on the last page of the novel, so he may as well call it that. The Charterhouse of Parma begins with a brilliant and incisive encapsulation of the Napoleonic romance, and its effect on Europe and on society. Any orthodox novel reader, picking up this excellent new translation by Richard ...”

“... of confrontation which he has used against the British printing unions in the Wapping dispute may hark back to his 19th-century predecessor as proprietor of the Times, but they were perfected in the US management-union wars of the 1970s, which were quite unarguably won by the managements. Equally clearly, the British unions had not learnt the lessons. All ...”

“... dangerous forces of working-class unrest and political protest were deeply unsettling. Today we may relate that unrest to the increased share of the new prosperity of a modernising and developing society which had been mopped up by the better-off, and may relate this prosperity to the new, British dimension. Given the ...”

“... measure of admiration as a scholar, a lawyer, a writer and a politician; for there is much in Robert Bolt’s adulatory A Man for All Seasons which reflects what we know of More. But More was not simply a principled Catholic; he was also something of a fanatic. The Victorian historian J.A. Froude described him as a merciless bigot. He described himself in ...”

“... He and I taught together at University College London in the 1970s. These personal allusions may savour of the excessive. Let me plead that they serve as an introduction to the uncertainties and inconsistencies of his experience of life, to his changing fortunes, contrasting reputations, to the human interest and eccentric charm of Stephen. Of the ...”

“... Maxwell Fyfe’s speech came in the triumphal wake of the Congress of Europe, held in The Hague in May 1948 with Churchill as its honorary chairman and 750 delegates from 17 European countries. Although the congress possessed no governmental authority, its cultural committee drew up a charter of fundamental rights to be enforced by a continental supranational ...”

“... An energetic thinker with some original ideas may understandably rebel against the oppressive demand to get it right, especially when the demand comes, as it often does, from cautious and conventional colleagues. In responsible subjects such as the natural sciences, such people rebel against the demand only at their peril – or rather, their ideas will succeed only if the demand is, in the end, obeyed, and the colleagues turn out merely to have been too cautious ...”

“... trotz alledem/Dass rings der Mensch die Bruderhand/dem Menschen reicht trotz alledem.’ It’s Robert Burns. ‘It’s coming yet, for a’ that,/That Man to Man the warld o’er/Shall brothers be for a’ that.’ The poet who translated it, Ferdinand Freiligrath, was soon driven out of Germany into exile. He was one of countless thousands across Europe ...”

“... come in the wake of break-ups. The lover – the bird or bard – has flown. The reader may very well think this is no bad thing. Williams’s leavers are all-rounders, shining, uncomplicated, confident, bossy creatures, ‘free to play or free to slack’, as Robert Lowell put it, the ‘or’ multiplying their ...”

“... have provided his clothes with some fine-art company in Yves Saint Laurent aux musées (until 15 May). At the Pompidou, by the entrance to the floor devoted to the 20th-century avant-garde, Matisse’s La Blouse roumaine (1940) hangs next to a mannequin dressed in an embroidered woollen blouse from the Autumn/Winter 1981 collection and a knee-length velvet ...”

“... and greater speed it is in site-specific installations that the art pilgrimage stays alive. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977) won’t come to you. You must, with some difficulty, go to them. The scale of the Hayward exhibition and the hermetic isolation of the installation give a good ...”

“... the movie is mostly about the way it looks. It’s meant to be a political thriller – based on Robert Harris’s novel The Ghost (the film has that title in the UK) – but it feels as if the writer went home halfway through, taking the story with him, and leaving the director and cinematographer to do what they could with the light and the setting. The ...”

“... catalogue essay María Dolores Sánchez-Jáuregui suggests that the pair depicted standing nearby may be Sandys and Basset. Although her evidence is slight, if true the identification would have implications she does not discuss, since both pairs are placed in the groups that Zoffany depicts via some hefty nudges as homosexual. The presence of the ...”

“... theatrical staging, a tableau vivant, which cannot but call to mind the ‘theatre of cruelty’, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, scenes from David Lynch movies. This brings us to the crux of the matter. Anyone acquainted with the US way of life will have recognised in the photographs the obscene underside of US popular culture. You can find similar ...”

“... with him usually agree that he was the most engaged and patient looker at art they ever knew. Robert Rosenblum rightly says, in David Sylvester: The Private Collection, that there was something comical about his high seriousness, but it is also true that, ‘unlike the rest of us ironists’, he could make one feel (or at least feel one ought to ...”