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“... at their ease; it’s argumentative. Here and there the argument is illuminating, as when David Bomberg’s In the Hold (c.1913-14) is hung next to Leon Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon (1971). Both are busy compositions, with a mass of vigorous figures squeezed closely into a space. But the Bomberg is pretty abstract and is ...”

“... studies fixture. It established her as a standard-bearer for the ‘new British realism’, in David Forrest’s phrase: an attempt to build on Ken Loach’s dialectical or discursive approach to the social and political realities of working-class life by developing a more ‘poetic’ or ‘phenomenological’ emphasis. The phenomenology has been thought ...”

“... If we see him as a second-generation recruit to the ranks of mid-century modernist loners – David Jones, Basil Bunting, W.S. Graham and R.S. Thomas – Finlay’s continued evasion of a biographer acquires honourable precedents. Jones has yet to be biographised (though long-time devotee Tom Dilworth is on the trail), Graham likewise; Justin Wintle’s ...”

“... to the way things are, they simply want to be free to drift along with their fate. All this makes David Cameron a classic democratic fatalist, rather than the pragmatist he likes to present himself as. He certainly behaved like one when he exercised his veto in Brussels. The definition of a pragmatic conservative is someone who wants things to change so that ...”

“... and the playful novels of Marivaux, while displeasing those who preferred the neoclassicism of David, and the stern Roman cadences of Rousseau’s Discourses. The paradox of Beaumarchais was that he sought to insert himself into the most exclusive circles of French society even as he crafted his public image before a largely middle-class reading ...”

“... This is the third part of a three-part article. Part 1: ‘Who Will Lose?’; Part 2: ‘Has Anyone Lost Yet?’ There’s an old adage about American presidential debates: nobody ever remembers the feed-line, only the response. Geraldine Ferraro is remembered for rounding on George Bush Sr in 1984 for patronising her, as is her 1988 successor Lloyd Bentsen – with an equally questionable excuse – for accusing Dan Quayle of comparing himself to President Kennedy ...”

“... I had just about made my peace with the 9/11 memorial, whose concept I had at first found generic and full of clichés: the trees, the pool of falling water, the glimpse into the void and so on. Despite a few false notes (the tacky little flags on the bagpipes, and George W. Bush reciting from a letter written by Abraham Lincoln to a mother who lost five sons in the Civil War, once again opportunistically figuring the deaths of unknowing civilians as military heroism), the opening ceremony on Sunday, 11 September had gone well ...”

“... Syria has for now turned into the war that never happened thanks to the gaffe that never was. Once John Kerry let slip that there was something Assad could do to head off a military strike – agree to international oversight of his chemical arsenal – the stalled march to war became a headlong retreat. Obama appears to have found a way out of the hole he had dug for himself, with a helping hand from Putin ...”

“... Lesson Three Dad was not dad. Dad was the mad train screaming daily into the station of his home, white-hot brakes shrieking, exploding across the platforms of the rooms. So regular, so on time, you could set your watch. Five hours. Four. Three. Two. The skies were my watch. I saw the evening redden, and I hid. Hiding to nowhere. A phrase I still hate ...”

“... the novel power of social media to drum up interest and financial support. His campaign manager David Plouffe liked to say of Obama’s candidacy: ‘Walking a tightrope without a net … That’s when we are at our best.’ Yet when Obama does make a misstep – and inevitably there are plenty, from dismissing Clinton as ‘likeable enough’, to ...”

“... and ill-considered) reaction against the generous concessions made to Egypt at Camp David: the war in the Lebanon was the second. Arik Sharon, who dates the start of his planning the war from the day he took office as Minister of Defence in July 1981, spelled out his views in a (Jewish) New Year issue of the muck-raking weekly Ha’olam ...”

“... and how he keeps coming back. T.S. Eliot said he was guilty of ‘crimes against taste’. David Lodge made him a twee subject of nostalgic research for the English hero of Small World, Philip Swallow, hopelessly outgunned by the vulgar but irresistible American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of ...”

“... regulators who looked incompetent. Branson’s strategy, his way of portraying himself as a plucky David in a world of corporate Goliaths doesn’t always work. Sometimes the charade is too transparent. Following the failed prosecution, BA turned its attention to alliances and takeovers to shore up its position, first with American Airlines, then Iberia, then ...”

“... which can be seen as a sort of compressed version of Guernica – whose dual models in Poussin and David are not painterly in style. Having gone further here than ever before into the post-Renaissance tradition, Picasso soon turned his back on it to work, more characteristically, in a pre-Giottesque tradition. If his painting of the period preceding his late ...”

“... Lennon associated with ‘all those bloody musicians and their GCEs’. In a 1982 interview with David Scheff, he insists again that although rock and roll first came into his consciousness through white singers like Bill Hayley, Elvis Presley and the most marked white influence on the Beatles, Buddy Holly, it was the original black music which ‘changed ...”