“... revelation in Pickles’s book. ‘I have not been able to reveal until now that it was Mr Justice Michael Davies who suggested that I jail Renshaw for seven days,’ he writes. ‘He asked how long I proposed to give her, and I said 21 days. “No, make it seven,” he said, and I did.’ There is not a trace of irony in this passage. Nor is there in his ...”

“... knees. The bullet entered his buttock and went straight through his heart. Someone had filmed the young man’s death, so there was no doubt about what he was doing. Widgery concluded that the bullet which got him must have been intended for someone else. The likelihood, suggested by the evidence and by what happened everywhere else, that Doherty had been ...”

“... confronts the beholder far more boldly. Charles Hope, in his remarkable monograph on Titian, like Michael Jacobs in a brisk and entertaining polemic on the nude in painting, rejects the idea that this is a painting of Venus.1 It represents simply ‘a mortal female lying on a bed’, as Hope puts it, ‘gazing at us with a startlingly direct and unambiguous ...”

“... holes. So far, the novel’s most thoughtful reviewers – Cynthia Ozick in the New York Times and Michael Gorra in the New York Review of Books – have taken care to talk about both the story-strands and the anxieties about story in Middle C. But they have shied away from trying to answer their own big questions about the novel. Gorra summarises the plot ...”

“... only one or two bees per bonnet. The Pevsnerian approach was different.In a witty essay, Michael Taylor, who drove Pevsner round Warwickshire, recalls the experience as stimulating and slightly nightmarish, ‘like viewing a video of a thousand years … of history … fast-forwarded’. Pevsner ‘robbed the word “specialist” of its meaning by ...”

“... in Berlin (1964) and Billion-Dollar Brain (1966) – and the movie adaptations of them starring Michael Caine. In the opening scenes of The Ipcress File, as Caine’s character briefly dozes off while brewing his morning coffee, you can see a cookstrip pinned to the kitchen wall. The cookstrips are said to have enabled men – thanks both to the ease of ...”

“... Reign of Love’ – was replaced by that of ‘Bloody Bill’ Marsden, an outstanding sadist. The young Hogg, as Lewis puts it, ‘co-operated enthusiastically in Marsden’s disciplinary reforms’. What can that mean? That he flogged smaller boys with a passion rare even in that intensely homoerotic environment? And his only redeeming feature, his ...”

“... and director of Demos, became a contributor to the paper’s opinion pages, as did a strange young man who had changed his name from Keith Ashworth to Perri 6. Hacks have a strong craft consciousness: they regard all senior editors who have not proved they are tough enough to cover hard news as effete and overpaid timewasters who will bring ruin on a ...”

“... be good for her’, while her mother observed that, with her big serious eyes, she ‘never was young from the time she was born’. In adult life people generally found her formidable: direct, interested only in the great issues, endlessly earnest, with no small talk, and more intelligent and better educated than almost everyone she met. This last she owed ...”

“... of these creatures is perched in front of the screen.Ortiz was born in 1969 and saw Star Wars as a young boy; he says that he has loved science fiction ever since. The ceramic figures he makes have travelled a long way from the traditional art of his people, but they’re recognisable descendants. The title of his wider mythological project, Revolt ...”

“... from the police in all these videos: disbelief, rage, grief, the recognition that yet another young black man has been killed. The video transforms an excruciating personal disaster, a private moment, into a public and political event. If we are not police or prosecutors, not a member of a community-relations group or a public commission on violence; if ...”

“... and tyranny’, he wrote in 1783, the American language should allow new usages to reflect its young and vigorous political institutions. Later, he became obsessed with the ‘disorder’ of American politics and language. By 1824, he was advocating linguistic identity with Britain. Lawson-Peebles’s most extensive and interesting exploration of his theme ...”

“... Wyatt and Campion and Pope before it as certainly as, after it, it disregards Pound and the young Eliot. Such blank verse – the unrhymed, relentlessly regular pentameter – can be squeezed out like toothpaste, ignoring the audibie shape of any one verse-line or run of lines, because we are supposed to be attending to larger and more urgent ...”

“... by animals, Indians and more mobs, they made their way to Salt Lake City, where he helped Brigham Young build a temple that still stands. Young sent Miles and his son, Miles P., to St George, Utah, where they built a tabernacle and a temple. Young commanded Miles P. to take more than one ...”

“... in, but then they would be barely noticeable: they wouldn’t register as a subject. The poets Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley published a book in 2011 called Edgelands, including chapters titled ‘Cars’, ‘Paths’, ‘Dens’, ‘Containers’, ‘Landfill’, ‘Sewage’, ‘Wire’; but this was a series of essays, championing the ...”