“... exhibitions are chiefly anthologies of good colour-plates. The one for the New York exhibition may seem more desirable because it covers the artist’s entire career, but the Paris catalogue is in some ways better. It has a more succinct preliminary essay, a more richly documented chronology and a valuable anthology of passages from Matisse’s letters or ...”

“... commanded from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Eighties, and points out that even coercive regimes ‘may rest on a general acceptance and sometimes enthusiasm’. The Wall that was built on the demarcation line between East and West Germany in August 1961 consolidated the power of the regime, while also forcing gaoler and gaoled to try and get along with each ...”

“... promise, vanity, constraint and fear. It creates intriguing and unpredictable consequences, which may occasionally be ‘solutions’ but usually throw up fresh problems and grievances. The political historian is not in the business of applying ‘progressive’ or ‘negative’ labels; his job is to explain assumptions, contexts and effects. Anyone who is ...”

“... if you spend too much time ploughing through such leaden and unrelievedly earnest material you may seriously damage your brain. One has to pick up the Critchley volume to remind oneself that politics is often funny. Critchley bids an appalled farewell to his colleagues, ‘Mother’ Teresa Gorman, ‘Little Norm’ Lamont, ‘Big Norm’ Tebbit and all the ...”

“... outmoded furniture, crumpled sheets, daylight streaming through windows. There is no sign of what may have happened the night before.The ghosts themselves do not at first seem very frightening. Many are identified only by faint physical traces: the scent of violets in the pantry; a pool of water by the window; a small round mark, like a cigarette burn, on the ...”

“... eluding his father’s attempts to keep him in ignorance of age, sickness and death. These may look like digressions but all have some bearing on the main narrative. Krishan compares Siddhartha’s shock on encountering mortality to Rani’s after losing her sons. It also resembles his own while observing the decline of his grandmother. For a young ...”

“... company Illumina. He also registered with Washington Speakers Bureau (through which Theresa May has received more than £600,000 in speaking fees since the pandemic began). In August 2018, Cameron was hired by Greensill as a ‘part-time adviser’ and given share options worth as much as $70 million. Because it was more than two years since he had left ...”

“... Wales, in ways that can eventually be explained, is treated as a sort of final insult. This then may be the paradox. The English reader who wants to be better-informed about Wales itself can go to Jan Morris. The same reader who wants to know what, locked in with themselves, the Welsh have contributed and are contributing to European politics and letters can ...”

“... be used in places MSG could never go. If you try enhancing the flavour of a biscuit with MSG it may end up tasting of Marmite. But use kokumi to make the biscuit biscuitier and nobody need know that anything was added at all. Perhaps kokumi will put an end to the misery of people who buy low-fat, low-salt food while secretly wishing they were eating the ...”

“... removed from his position as foreign minister, though not from the Politburo; his wife’s arrest may well have been part of a move by Stalin to oust him from the leadership altogether. Zhemchuzhina was sentenced to five years’ exile in Kazakhstan.Schlögel​ calls Chanel and Zhemchuzhina ‘iron women’, a term first used by the Russian émigrée Nina ...”

“... aren’t conspicuously poorer than other countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Their biggest burden may simply be the sense that France asserts its primacy over them by means of the currency. In recent years, with the rise of anti-French sentiment across Francophone Africa, the continuing hold of the CFA franc has begun to mobilise young people. The CFA zone is ...”

“... people’ to pass. Even if you find the apartment, you might not find Blam: he may have slipped out along the narrow walkway that crosses the roof, above ‘the abyss’ of Main Square. On the other hand, ‘if there were a search warrant out for him’ the mansard’s seclusion would ‘turn it into a trap’. If cornered he’d ...”

“... distance from some school – suddenly stuff like that did get approved. The activity level may also change due to specific intelligence, or simply because the only remaining targets are not within the range permitted by level one, ‘because the “target bank” had been depleted.’ ‘Hamas is pushing for a display of victory,’ that’s always ...”

“... numbersAnd so we scattered as instructed, meFor Route 110, Cookstown via Toome and Magherafelt.It may be Charon and the Underworld in disguise, but a new peace is held up against an old peace; terror, murder, sectarianism and occupation all feel a little more remote.Listen to Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss Seamus Heaney in their Close Readings series on ...”

“... is hard to imagine, however, that de Man is bedside reading for the theory-allergic Heaney.Words may not be things, but the poet, like the small child making its first sounds, is one who invests them as though they were. There is thus something regressively infantile as well as dauntingly mature about poetry, rather as the grandeur of the imagination is ...”