“... with the top frogs in the entertainment industry. But there’s no way of checking on that.) They may both be green and imaginary, but apart from that the two frogs are very different. The frog-as-prince is the embodiment of a profoundly anti-frog message: to be a frog is to be punished, to be sentenced to a season in purgatory. As with most fairy ...”

“... of language themselves, at least not in public, but leave it to civilian internationalists like Mr David Watt and Mr Silkin. One also senses that the Navy does not itself use the shark-like term ‘hunter-killer’ for its submarines. We have the good fortune to have a silent and professional military establishment. One of Argentina’s many troubles is that ...”

“... Some drawings, made as ends in themselves, can be called ‘presentation drawings’, others may have been made as part of a painter’s education. Some seem to have no purpose other than to please the maker. In Leonardo’s red chalk profiles of an old and a young man, young beauty and crumpled age are so well represented in the young man’s ringlets ...”

“... of people claiming to be in love after decades of marriage resemble those of new lovers. Romance may authentically survive: ‘That’s what the brain scans are telling us. People can’t fake that.’ ‘Brain-Scan Lie Detectors Coming in Near Future,’ runs a news story, cued by a San Diego company press release. Will they become part of legal routine, or ...”

“... and joking about Nietzsche. Since the Zeitgeist business is so vigorous just now many may find Selbourne’s title and prophetic posture quite appealing. But I suspect even those with pronounced apocalyptic tastes will be liable to exhaustion en route to his particular revelation. There are no oases. Over 376 pages, every glimmer of emergent hope ...”

“... is having his first one-man show at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice: 15 February until 31 May. This is the book of the exhibition. Modern interest in Arcimboldo dates from his inclusion, by means of enlarged photographs, in the exhibition ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’, organised by Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in ...”

“... IDF. But they are free to call that arrangement a Palestinian state. As to Trump’s thinking, he may well have intended to repeal America’s commitment to a two-state solution, although his ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, has stated categorically that there was no such intention. When Trump said that he would be as happy with a one-state agreement as ...”

“... Etymology doesn’t help us much here. Ennui is French but it is related to annoy, and spree may come from Old Norse, or it may actually be French, an elision of esprit. The OED merely murmurs about the word’s ‘obscure origin’. Still, whatever their derivation, the words do seem to belong to quite different ...”

“... Fielding seems to have been playing on Lady Mary’s hostility to Pope and his friends, and may have hoped through her influence to secure the patronage of the Prime Minister Walpole. There was no love lost between Walpole and the Scriblerians either, and Fielding’s fluctuating attitudes to them are sometimes inverse indicators of where Fielding stood ...”

“... invention of powered flight is so familiar that it’s easy to think we know all about it. David McCullough’s excellent biography The Wright Brothers brings the story back to life with facts that the non-specialist either doesn’t know or has blotted out with a misplaced broad brush. Yeah yeah, we get it: the brothers were provincial tinkerers who ...”

“... part in a research project prompted by the government-sponsored campaign of 2013, when Theresa May was home secretary, in which vans carried billboards bearing the words ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.’ In order to understand how such a thing as that billboard could have come about, we felt we needed some insight into the mindset of the ...”

“... Her appearances were always lively. Wearing black leather and stilettos, she flirted with David Letterman, telling him that the ‘important lesson’ she learned from her father is ‘balls’: ‘I somehow grew them somewhere along the line.’ Conan O’Brien was a bit shrill for her taste, shrieking about portraits painted in blood and the time ...”

“... be the same something that they are, also hold that identity is relative. They think that a and b may coincide under the concept f, yet fail to coincide under some other concept g. For instance, I am the same person as won such and such a prize at school over fifty years ago, but not the same boy, for I am no longer a boy. Or again, the river in which I swam ...”

“... other learned historians look illiterate beside him. Though not a great lover of footnotes, which may still in his day have seemed a shade ungentlemanly, he used them, as ‘a necessary evil’, to support his historical narrative and to confound his contemporaries: but it turns out that even he exaggerated his acquaintance with primary archives. Anyway, he ...”

“... and Randolph Quirk) jostle with poets and novelists (including Medbh McGuckian and Amy Tan). David Dabydeen writes ‘On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today’, and discusses, in impeccably establishment English, a question that might just as well come under ‘Art’: how does a black writer in English find an authentic voice: what does s/he ...”