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“... appealing to a public – and a legal system – that took racialised bondage entirely for granted.Simon Newman’s new book takes this story back to its origins in late 17th-century London, the birthplace both of large-scale English involvement in transatlantic slavery and of the first popular printed English newspapers and advertisements. As colonial ...”

“... answers to the diverse problems that have composed the muddle. The American journalist John Simon has for some years been writing a column in Esquire in which he takes a conservative view of linguistic change in true dinner-party fashion: opposing almost every innovation in contemporary usage, and mixing up several independent considerations in the ...”

“... practice. It is as if we had only the lyrics, without recordings or melodies, of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Joan Baez – and those only in indifferent Portuguese translations. Most of their power and all of their subtlety would vanish. For similar reasons, the troubadours have more often been honoured as cultural pioneers than admired as ...”

“... then walking out of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here. The rise and fall of PiL, recounted by Simon Reynolds with great vividness and detail, is the archetypal story of the tumultuous pop music era of the late 1970s and early 1980s, known rather bloodlessly since as post-punk. Until recently, the PiL story was one of the few about post-punk that even keen ...”

“... naivety – Twombly’s, or possibly their own – and tend to overcompensate for it. Here’s Simon Schama in his introduction to the catalogue for Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper: ‘Twombly’s Apollo is not the fine-limbed hunk of the Belvedere, but the pitiless flayer of Marsyas … what Twombly draws from archaic mythology is its poetic ...”

“... Simon​ de Pury, assisted by ‘a regular contributor to Vanity Fair’, has written a book about his ascent to the top of the art world: the auctions he conducted, the deals he struck, the parties he attended. It resembles a board game, with smaller parts assigned to the ‘hedge fund overlord’, the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king ...”

“... Pevsner’s is more difficult than it looks. It defeats A.N. Wilson in Who Was Oswald Fish?, as Simon Bradley points out in a wide-ranging essay on ‘Pevsner in Fiction, Theatre and Cinema’. Imitation even of the most laconic entries is difficult. Only Alan Hollinghurst, among Bradley’s examples, gets it nearly right. But Pevsner was if not an ...”

“... identical with heresy, when he, an early anti-clerical, knew this to be untrue. In reply to one Simon Fish, who had argued that England’s travails had to do with the greed and idleness of the clergy, More claimed that things were much the same as they had always been, and then appealed to Henry VIII’s vanity as Defender of the Faith to stamp out the ...”

“... praises for it. The more minimal the gesture, the more rapturous the explanation offered. Barnett Newman painted a vertical stripe on a canvas, and Thomas Hess saw it as a version of divine creation – ‘as God separated light from darkness, with a line drawn in the void’. (The metaphor does not even correspond to the painting, since ...”

“... of Wharton’s novels: not only in its use of the international theme or the echoes of Christopher Newman and Isabel Archer in the naming of its protagonist, but in the implicit argument that the imagination of fulfilment may be superior to the experience itself. ‘It’s more real to me here than if I went up,’ Archer thinks as he pictures the scene in ...”