“... were, to a lad, left out. In the summer the British Art Show arrived in London. In the meantime, Peter Fuller had died in a car crash. Fuller never lived to type out the words ‘Damien Hirst’. He died before the Turner Prize began to favour younger artists, before Saatchi started collecting the new art of the Nineties. But his is still a spectral presence ...”

“... brief statement of its current force, and a way of holding the whole issue before our minds, in Peter de Bolla’s book Art Matters.2 De Bolla is looking at a Barnett Newman painting (Vir Heroicus Sublimis) in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has decided that the usual critical questions – what does this painting mean, what is it trying to say ...”

“... arrests and all-round discomforts that made life for everyone extremely hard. While we were there Peter Hansen, the Danish commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main aid organisation serving Palestinians, spoke out strongly about the dangers – including starvation – of Israeli policies in the West Bank and ...”

“... places us, who are fat with it, in direct if hopelessly unequal relationship to her. Everyone reading this has a verified self, an identity, formed through and confirmed by identification, that is attested to be ‘true’. You can’t function in the world without it: you can’t open a bank account, get a credit card or national insurance number, or a ...”

“... the direction of Maurice Thomson and associates of such later fame as Thomas Rainsborough and Hugh Peter; and a naval rampage round the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean, from Maracaibo to Jamaica to Guatemala, in collusion with Warwick. Once the fighting in England broke out, the same syndicate moved into control of the financial and Naval machinery of ...”

“... for our imaginations to fill.It was in this spirit that I found myself thinking of Schubert when reading Anne Carson in the LRB (6 March 2025):Let’s start with life, your life. There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become ...”

“... on friendly terms with men such as William Godwin and the great satirical poet John Wolcot, ‘Peter Pindar’, whom Pitt’s government regarded as dangerously disloyal.Friendship was his true vocation and chief talent, and he worked at it tirelessly. The great majority of his numerous poems – he described them, without false modesty, as ...”

“... hope’, he calculated in March 1931), the question arose as to how to fill their epistolary days. Reading Keats’s letters in the latter part of 1931, he encountered the journal-letters to George and Georgiana on the Western frontier of the United States. Eliot earmarked Keats’s strategies: ‘These are trifles – but I require nothing so much of you as ...”

“... site it was illegally occupying), disposable stadia – legacy is all important. It’s like reading the will and sharing the spoils before the sick man is actually dead. ‘The legacy the Games leave is as important as the sporting memories,’ Tony Blair said. And the legacy is: loss, visions injected straight into the eyeballs, lasting shame. We have ...”

“... to be the coroner’, but whatever self-justifications he might have entered as evidence, the reading of his file is hampered by his absence. It is an unwritten rule of MI5 that Personal Files (PFs) are only released after their subjects have died. Another unwritten rule, among so many, is that it only releases such material after fifty years, which ...”

“... an arch with a kink at one end like a giant dog ball thrower, is, according to its designer Peter Jenkins, the first of its kind in the world. ‘I’d like to think that George Stephenson would have approached the challenge in a similar manner, laying the new railway infrastructure over the old,’ he told the Manchester Evening News. Even the Chinese ...”

“... these is a capitalist law of Cheap Nature, analogous to the quest for cheap labour. In a standard reading of Marx’s law of value, capital strives to get ever more commodity production from an hour’s labour while paying the labourer ever less for that hour as a share of its costs. Without dissenting from this, Moore sees the effort to boost labour ...”

“... towards a door half-open, implying the recent departure of a male companion, Moretti – reading the image as a depiction, in Hegel’s phrase, of the ‘prose of everyday life’ – exclaimed: ‘That is the beginning of the novel.’ In other words, a narrative of ordinary people in a familiar setting – neither epic nor tragedy. Ginzburg then ...”

“... in the mornings and wrote in the afternoons. ‘My inspiration for my stories came partly from my reading of William Saroyan, and my unthinking delight, “I can do that too.”’ In the evenings she went to ethics, logic and psychology lectures at the university, and once a week she met up with the ‘young handsome’ John Money, ‘glistening with newly ...”

“... depth and all-round ahead-of-the-curveness – like subscribing to ArtForum and actually reading it. Martin is the sort of artist show-offs show off about, know-it-alls know about. I think I like her – the whole chaste package – because she was so obviously unlike me, so seemingly unencumbered with envy or the need to strategise. Thinking about ...”