“... 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 ...”

“... the Sadean woman a lad who, in spite of his prodigious ‘recovery rate’ and sperm flow (they may not be so good at conversation, she says on the TV programme, but who needs conversation? Well, I do, for one; can I be alone?), is essentially desirable for his passivity: ‘Boyhood is the blessed time when he still remembers how to give and take pleasure ...”

“... been those carried out against liberal intellectuals with no ability to protect themselves. It may be that this impression of haplessness derives in large part from Wakeman’s reliance on the memoir of a one-time Dai subordinate who later turned Communist, Shen Zui. Shen’s account is indispensable, but it is also a sophisticated propaganda product that ...”

“... standards for judging the noise, the fear, the savagery. ‘Here,’ he wrote from Verdun in May 1916, ‘it is extermination on the ground.’ He told her about the never-ending artillery duel, the comrade who was cut in two by shrapnel, the gas attacks, the dismembered, stinking corpses of horses – everything that newsreels, photographs, newspapers ...”

“... well, not of Burke, but of Philip Francis, who had once been a friend of Burke’s (though he may not have been ‘Junius’ anyway). At times Hitchens’s prose seems entirely shaped by his tireless search for inconsequential correspondences. My favourite is this: ‘Just as Paine’s joke about dress and lost innocence was intended to remind his ...”

“... Henry St George in Henry James’s ‘The Lesson of the Master’ resides. The style of the book may seem plain: there is no recourse to the use of cadence for effect, and there are no elaborate sentences or pyrotechnics of any sort. We are, after all, in England, where words mean what they say. So numerous are the images of stability and continuity in these ...”

“... make the hard problem go away. But they were wrong to think that. There is hardly anything that we may not have to cut loose from before the hard problem is through with us. Still, all else being equal, whoever gives up least is the winner; so it matters whether Strawson has abandoned more than he needs to. I’m not convinced that we will have to throw ...”

“... It is the land towards which we turn as the fountain of all our hopes; it is the land to which we may look with as true a patriotism as we do to this dear old England, which we love so much. This is an upmarket version of the proprietorial impulse described by Lawrence. The investigators of the Palestine Exploration Fund had the resources and ambition to ...”

“... earlier, seemingly definitive versions of these stories. A further problem is that reader fatigue may set in if a life is made to continue: writers need to know when to bring the curtain down. Many of us rebel when Tolstoy tries giving his subjects an afterlife. Natasha, plump and happy among nappies and nursery concerns, seems a sad falling off from the ...”

“... to say about interwar economic change and the role such hard-to-measure factors as love and duty may have played in driving it. Young women emerge in this history as a critically important force for economic transformation, and Todd comes up with an unexpected explanation for their canny and self-interested behaviour. When we imagine a typical interwar ...”

“... a comparison – not mine – with a journey through the great intestine. The great outdoors may be more what Nouvel and his team had in mind. In the event it’s all very Aardman Animations; the leather upholstery on the partitions simply elevates a clunky failure of taste into an error of judgment: leather means cattle, cattle means pasture and pasture ...”

“... knew more about where the musicians came from, or who they were before the band existed. Solipsism may be a theme that plays against Lethem’s considerable strengths. In Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, the personal had a social and artistic context. The backdrop of You Don’t Love Me Yet is flimsy by comparison; the wider world is ...”

“... play of characters at all. The amorphousness of his prose, its dependence on cumulative effect, may derive from the fact that his characters lack the willpower to shape their lives and thus the novel that describes them. Yet they seem strong enough to deserve a more generous treatment. Austerlitz survives an early trauma and a narrow upbringing to establish ...”

“... found no human presence, and there is no archaeological record of pre-European colonisation. This may be one of the very few cases in the New World in which the word ‘discovery’ is not a misnomer. In Evolution’s Workshop, his chronological account of the biological exploration of the islands, Edward Larson tells the colourful story of the visitors who ...”

“... but completely overlooked case-by-case study of American news decisions, reporters may be liberal on some issues, but they are reliably conservative on economic questions. This is one of the reasons, Lieberman argues, that right-wing foundations have had such gratifying media support for their views on welfare reform, Nafta and Social Security ...”