“... He argues, for instance, that Sons and Lovers and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are autobiographical novels of a broadly similar kind, dependent for intelligibility on a knowledge of their biographical contexts and sources, and less good than Dickens’s earlier version of the same thing: ‘Neither book is as variegated and ...”

“... really be polarised against marriage for ‘convenience’? Do systems which purport to allow young people to choose their own marital partners really act in this way or are they a fiction? How do systems of ‘free’ mate-selection really work? Is there a radical difference in attitude and practice with regard to such matters in families and social ...”

“... of a beauty and complexity to be found nowhere else in Western Europe except Spain. They married young and sought to drive out the English by outnumbering them. All the same, even if a way of life based exclusively upon the potato may be richer than Sir Charles Trevelyan suggests, when the root fails, all is lost. It is estimated that up to a million people ...”

“... with moss growing on their tongues. The former warden John Davis tells a story about the historian David Cox, who, as an undergraduate, climbed onto the Codrington Library and stole the weather vane from the Christopher Wren sundial. When he was elected a fellow, he climbed back up and replaced it. Nobody, as far as he could tell, had noticed its absence.The ...”

“... of reach for those who need it most urgently, but cannot pay for a lawyer. He and his successors (David Gauke is the fourth justice secretary in three years) failed to resist the cuts that by 2020 will have reduced the Ministry of Justice’s budget by 40 per cent in a decade, and have already caused it to lose many of its senior and most competent civil ...”

“... he arrived in Paris in 1785, Boilly specialised in cabinet paintings for private collectors. Two Young Women Kissing (c.1790), on display at the National Gallery’s small exhibition of his paintings (until 19 May), was previously catalogued as The Friends and Two Sisters, kidding absolutely nobody. These early works, heavy in innuendo and set in fashionable ...”

“... combining riffs on Mao and Mies van der Rohe with explicit sex scenes between a trio of attractive young Londoners, in a weird baby-talk register – all ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ and short, repetitive sentences. ‘And Nana and Moshe were romantic. They were romantic in their way. They loved each other. They said they loved each other. It was true.’ The ...”

“... print. Dover Books brought out a paperback edition of Lady Audley’s Secret in 1974, and in 1987 David Skilton edited it for the Oxford World’s Classics. In the interim, as Lyn Pykett’s excellent introduction to a new Oxford edition explains, both Braddon and sensation fiction in general experienced a revival as a result of the rise of feminist criticism ...”

“... might no longer want to be where he thought he was going. I don’t know whether Carruth regards David Lynch as an influence, but Lynch’s name kept coming into my mind as I tried to find a temporary shorthand for the effect of Upstream Colour. The characters are quiet, self-contained, even self-absorbed; they are consumed by a project they themselves do ...”

“... million came in only last Friday!’ Easy come, easy go. When the boss of the central bank, David Oddsson, and the finance minister, Arni Mathiesen, declared after nationalising Icesave that Iceland would not pay these debts – or, in Mathiesen’s version, might perhaps settle some part of them – the UK applied its anti-terrorist laws to freeze the ...”

“... his sister on the day of a family party. The prosecutor in the case was Christie, and he and the young Kushner are said to have been at odds throughout the campaign. So far the Trump regime seems to consist of four factions, bound together by personal loyalty to the president-elect, some of it long-standing, most of it recent and opportunistic. There is ...”

“... a living place where works of art could be enjoyed, inherent to the domestic setting, where young people could be at home unhampered by the greater austerity of the museum or public art gallery, and where an informality might infuse an underlying formality’. In his book A Way of Life (1984), he writes of wanting, ‘in a modest way, to use the ...”

“... like the only life left on the earth, all other plants having sent their sap below. Caspar David Friedrich’s Winter Landscape (1811), a version of which is currently on display at the Towner Gallery (until 22 January), shows a snowy post-sunset scene with a group of pine trees in the foreground, and the dark form of a distant cathedral just visible ...”

“... rising a little, his look reflective. These two fatigued pioneers are comfortably welcoming a young master and colleague. The Flaherty portrait recalls Ingres’s M. Bertin (the drawing, not the painting), the bluff man with his hands on his knees in defiance of all portrait convention. The glorious black-and-whiteness of all these portraits and scenes ...”

“... could come and go, travel or pursue an education, seek work or live outside the camp, and (for the young and female) trade companionship or sex for meals, dates or even marriage: for a DP woman, Fitzpatrick writes, marriage to an American GI was ‘as good as it got’. Indeed, DPs who were young at the time often remember ...”