“... of our religion and the shame of our country.’ England’s political and commercial elite may have been able to stomach trade with the ‘Turk’, but there is no getting around the deep-rooted (if ill-informed) antipathy shared by large swathes of the population. Their attitude is reflected by Portia’s response in The Merchant of Venice, when the ...”

“... what happens in front of the real thing: the pictures are not chambers of horrors. Their detail may regularly be disgusting or tawdry or delectable (almost in the way of Baudelaire’s ‘Une charogne’), but by and large it is firmly contained, almost neutralised, by the whole painted rectangle, that is, by the ordinariness of the ...”

“... to be spreading, no doubt being seen in high places as a sound qualification for anyone who may now be angling to land a job sorting things out in Iraq itself. The man who has been put in charge of a body called the Iraq Industry Working Group was quoted last week as saying that within quite a short time – as little as three years, he thought – Iraq ...”

“... the Whitney has chosen only one. Warhol used three photographs from a Life magazine photo-essay of May 1963 which documented a civil rights march in Birmingham, Alabama, and, specifically, the attempt of one man to escape the police and their dogs. In the prints Warhol dispenses with the verbal frame of caption and headline, and variously rearranges the ...”

“... who never sets out to harm anyone and registers only confusion as misery flowers in his wake – may be one of Levy’s more topical exercises in perspective. The novel maps a self being pieced back together so that the weakest points show. It also addresses a moment in history that could feel like a bad dream or a bad joke, and Levy has always taken those ...”

“... but some of the most remarkable and evocative have only come to light recently, and there may be more to be discovered. Taylor is not compiling an anthology, but he listens carefully to the seamen’s voices and brings out their personalities by paraphrase more than direct quotation. Deep-sea sailors were not, as is sometimes suggested, the wretched ...”

“... red states might consider reforming the electoral college is if Texas turns Democratic, which may happen within the next 15 years.) And though there’s no constitutional limit on the number of Supreme Court justices, the very suggestion of expanding the court raises accusations of ‘court-packing’, as if it amounted to political thuggery, if not ...”

“... between religion and fly fishing.’ Tom Fort’s Casting Shadows: Fish and Fishing in Britain may not qualify as ‘literature’; but it offers garrulous witness to a fine passion. Fort, who is a former fishing columnist at the Financial Times and the author of, among others, The Book of Eels, Against the Flow and The Far from Compleat Angler is a sort ...”

“... local communities, and seems to regard local people who ‘stray’ into a park – which may well have been established on their ancestral land without their consent – as ‘enemies’ of conservation. New laws around poaching, as applied in ‘wilderness’ areas, ignore the already fraught relationship between local communities and law ...”

“... there are minor chapters in Burkina and Niger, Kemetism in the Sahel is found mostly in Mali; it may be that Nko, which shares with Kemetism a focus on African cultural emancipation, prepared the ground for this polytheistic, non-doctrinaire religion. Its followers are modest in number but ambitious. Last October, a video surfaced on WhatsApp and Facebook of ...”

“... the remarkable series of photographs of Guernica which she undertook as the painting took shape in May to June 1937, and photographs of Picasso himself, she more or less abandoned photography for painting when she became Picasso’s mistress – and continued to paint after their break-up. Caws makes a case for the originality of her painting: the portraits ...”

“... further reason to accept that systems of social relations and modes of production or reproduction may indeed ‘gaslight’ us. In any case, her plea seems peculiarly depoliticising at a time when more people than ever before are using the term ‘gaslit’ to talk about media norms and cultural hegemonies. As Leslie Jamison notes in the New Yorker, ‘the ...”

“... often happened in production, to tilt the play towards a quite different meaning.Yet the problem may be deeper than that. Brecht looked for historical instances and for parables as a way of teaching us lessons, not only about history, but about the contemporary world. The method quickly engages us, but in the case of Galileo, for example, the problem now is ...”

“... who reigned over London high society between the wars; arranging debutante balls for her daughters may have been her sole maternal pleasure.) Blackwood’s first husband, Lucian Freud, painted her; Walker Evans photographed her; she was the dedicatee of Lowell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Dolphin. (Sample epithet for Blackwood: ‘baby killer ...”

“... in its architecture and its political character. A new parliament building had been inaugurated in May. The Central Vista, the axis of the British imperial capital, was being reconstructed at vast expense. The exhibition complex across the street from the Purana Qila had been razed and rebuilt as the venue for the 2023 G20 Summit. As the climax of India’s ...”