“... state William Seward drinks too much and blusters about invading Canada; the US ambassador Charles Francis Adams keeps a stiff and chilly distance from London society, managing to seem both unformed and overly formal; the Confederate envoy James Mason says ‘chaw’ for ‘chew’, calls himself ‘Jeems’ and offends British officials with his crude racist ...”

“... for real. Wyndham Lewis is a good example of the first; Gorky and de Kooning of the second. Francis Bacon started, so the Tate show demonstrates, as a diligent – too diligent – student of the second kind, battling away at the enigma of Cubist space; he failed to solve it; and where he ended up is another matter.) The question remains why. What stood ...”

“... enough, have a great deal invested in such matters. Value follows intention. There is no greater mark of the gap that separates writers and English departments than the question of value. The very thing that most matters to writers, the first question they ask of a work – is it any good? – is often largely irrelevant to university teachers. Writers are ...”

“... these required examination in depth and in perspective. ‘It is a commonplace of criticism,’ Francis Hitchman wrote in the Quarterly Review in 1880, ‘that the history of the Newspaper Press of England has yet to be written. Times without number the work has been attempted, but it still remains unachieved.’ In setting out to deal with what more than a ...”

“... his baptism. Two months later, Darnley’s dead body – strangled, though ‘not a hurt nor a mark’ on him – was discovered in a garden near Kirk o’ Field. (Whodunit? The record is a mess and historians mostly admit defeat.) Elizabeth sent Mary a letter. She offers her condolences, but also, as a ‘faithful cousin’ and ‘affectionate ...”

“... A nest of gossip and expertise, and a delightful garden still haunted by the reasonable spirit of Francis Bacon.’ All this will presumably annoy those who value the darker, early McEwan, not the comfortable, slightly smug later version. And there is something mildly provoking about his elaboration of the Roy Jenkins-style good life: Fiona and Jack, with ...”

“... or Klimt’s self-pleasuring odalisques. They’re charged with a furious erotic longing, and in Francis Bacon’s terms, they go straight past the brain to the nervous system. Self-revelation is an art, and public intimacy – to use Giuliana Bruno’s phrase – requires crafty selection, decisions and deceptions. ‘Hotel International’ (1993) The ...”

“... sea-run adult will seek to return at least once in its life: an impulse that was confirmed by Francis Bacon in the 1620s, when he tied ‘a Ribband or some known tape or thred’ around the tail of a sea-bound smolt, retrieving it the following year when the fish returned as a splendid silver grilse. ‘Smolt’, ‘grilse’: as Richard Shelton ...”

“... himself, with irony, as an ‘honourable man’, it’s hard not to suspect him of having Mark Antony’s funeral oration from Julius Caesar in mind. Sumner, meanwhile, for all his pretensions to cerebral aloofness – he watches his first whale hunt from the crow’s nest – is ready to get his hands dirty when he thinks he needs to. There’s a ...”

“... years on, the strength of Berlin’s interpretation continues to be evident in the new books by Mark Lilla and Joseph Mali, both of which range Vico against the Enlightenment. Both writers are, however, aware of recent Italian scholarship on Vico, which has in the same period taken a more specifically historical direction. They differ from Berlin over ...”

“... the piano’s one-step-forward, one-step-back into a better beat. The doubt and trepidation that mark the borders of the song aren’t lessened, but the territory within is singing with energy; the uncertainty that a moment before said fear now says who cares. The rhythm becomes a chase after pleasure; the chase is caught and let loose for the pleasure of ...”

“... so faithful a film fan. Nixon occupied the White House for 67 months. Over that time, according to Mark Feeney’s Nixon at the Movies, he saw 528 movies – an average of nearly two a week. The rate stepped up once Watergate began to darken his presidency in 1973. Chisum was a quintessential Nixon entertainment. The Western was the president’s preferred ...”

“... attempted military coup was foiled in 1981. Nevertheless, Western democracy survived, and by 1989 Francis Fukuyama had published an article, later a bestselling book, announcing the ‘end of history’. With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, Fukuyama maintained, the only ideal left standing was liberal democracy. Even at the time his claims seemed ...”

“... the next few years in various other essays and reviews, the best of which are brought together in Mark Blacklock’s new edition of the journalism. Ballard’s view was that science fiction should get over its ‘juvenile’ fixation on outer space and concentrate instead on ‘inner space’ – an imaginative zone where ‘the inner world of the mind and ...”

“... unsound. We have, however, heard all this, or something rather like it, before. To paraphrase Mark Twain, everyone has complained about Freudian theory but no one has done anything about it. Bloodied but unbowed by a century of critique, the Freudian outlook continues to be taught in our classrooms and applied in our clinics. Though they have disagreed ...”