“... the scans, I was able to make out several more lines: originally, as many as twenty of the spines may have been inscribed. And then, one discovery abruptly transformed my understanding of the whole painting. I had zoomed in on an unidentified volume with a lavishly decorated binding. It’s a big, fat book: that’s one clue. Alongside it, largely hidden ...”

“... were already speaking out against spontaneous violence on their social networks and though it may have been a complicated algorithmic lie, they looked to be a majority. But by January, with seven ‘acts’ down and more to come, trying to focus on who was or wasn’t up for a fight seemed pointless as long as huge questions still hung in the air about ...”

“... Quinn and her parents – father a long-distance lorry driver, mother a worker at the Bryant & May match factory – had rented the downstairs floor of a private terraced house in Usher Road, Bow, a land of cobblestones, cigarette smoke, crowded pubs and crowded bedrooms, backyard privies and tin baths filled with water heated on the range. Usher Road was ...”

“... is of similar quality. But the Barbara Cartland streak was never far from the surface:Perhaps we may still sense the mystery of nature, listen to its song of life and beauty, and draw vitality from her. That song is not sung in the chosen spots only, and we can hear it, if we have the ears for it, almost everywhere. But there are some places where it charms ...”

“... of the Chinese Labour Corps, some civilian victims of a daylight air-raid on Folkestone on 25 May 1917, in which 95 people were killed and 195 injured.)1 I guess an obsession is defined, crudely enough, by the fact that one doesn’t understand it. Even as it besets, its determinants remain opaque. (The word ‘obsession’, interestingly, is originally a ...”

“... of trying to read Mbeki’s mind, always in a manner maximally sympathetic to him. Such sympathy may be seen as a biographer’s duty but it is striking how much less willing Gevisser is than most to describe Mbeki as paranoid, and he never mentions the grandiosity that goes with it. Gevisser’s major claims for Mbeki are that he steered the ANC towards ...”

“... Peterschule, where instruction was in German, Kharms was also fluent in English; his anglophilia may explain the pseudonym he adopted in 1924, which echoes the Cyrillic transcription of Sherlock Holmes’s surname. But, much like Kharms himself, the name is an idiosyncratic one-off, unplaceable within any obvious frame of reference, except perhaps some ...”

“... Senator McCarthy’s power was at its noxious zenith. The citizens of Mosinee, Wisconsin used May Day 1950 to stage an ‘Iron Curtain’ fantasia in which schoolchildren paraded with posters of Stalin and ‘secret police’ carried out mock arrests and purges. It was in this atmosphere that Arthur Schlesinger Jr published his influential book The Vital ...”

“... 12-minute short was screened in Mexico City to help raise funds for the victims. In early May they went to the state of Hidalgo, and spent the next four months at a hacienda at Tetlapayac, in the middle of a landscape strewn with maguey plants; the smell of fermenting pulque wafted through the air, volcanoes shimmered in the distance. Tensions had by ...”

“... of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.’ The problems, the struggles and ultimately the tragedy all lay in the second half of the article: what was an abuse and ...”

“... some notable way’. Yet people who are like me in one notable way (politics, or taste in music) may not be like me in another (age, education, skin colour, income or – especially – location). Tastes correlate with all those other variables – as Pierre Bourdieu never tired of showing – but their correlation is less than perfect: otherwise critics ...”

“... of trees, shrubs, water, meadows, cottages, and houses; what is commonly called Views. These … may delight the owner of the acres they enclose, the inhabitants of the spot, perhaps the antiquary or the traveller, but to every other eye they are little more than topography. The landscape of Titian, of Mola, of Salvator, of the ...”

“... to dismiss their notions as primitive, irrational or bizarre, you should reflect that the fault may lie not in them but in you. The chances are that the problems that bothered them were nothing like the ones that strike you as obvious or inevitable, and that they were offering sensible answers to their own questions rather than foolish answers to ...”

“... French Communist Party. Kahnweiler said Picasso was the most apolitical man he ever met, and he may have been right. In 1934, Picasso accepted an invitation from the Falangist avant-garde in San Sebastián to meet José Antonio Primo de Rivera, future leader of the Falange, and the son of the military dictator during the last years of the monarchy. Picasso ...”

“... position occupied by no other city in a European society of comparable size. Madrid, Rome, Berlin may be capitals, but to their rank as seats of government corresponds no such predominance in culture, where Barcelona, Milan, Frankfurt can in different ways rival or outdo them. London is flanked by seats of learning whose prestige has long surpassed its ...”