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“... and Rouault, three who knocked me flat before I could think, before I knew a thing, leaving me no way back, and took John Keats in a room by the Spanish Steps, stanza della morte, where I caught one glimpse of the flowered beams and fainted fast, and took Pierre Bonnard who delved with me deep in the mysteries of ...”

“... they are merely instruments, you have to show them who’s master, not surrender to them. There is no problem in wordless thinking. The plainness of Orwell’s style in this passage is trading upon vague but powerful sentiments in the reader – contempt for Appeasement, his determination to stand up to the Russians, and so forth. I don’t object to the ...”

“... the nominees step up to the microphones to address the cheering party faithful in the convention hall, and the nation on television and radio, they will leave behind them the committee wranglings over party platforms and the balloting of the state party delegates which brought them their nominations. Although one nominee will be the incumbent ...”

“... a frame.’ I assume that the Dutch boys, like many others, discovered The Fall by listening to John Peel. There was no MySpace or MTV then, and Peel was a key part of the network through which word spread about these bands. The mainstream media rarely acknowledged Joy Division or The Fall, and with the exception of Mark ...”

“... IRA was founded. But the joke points to a deeper resistance to sectarianism. ‘There is no our side and their side on our street,’ Pa tells his sons. When a loyalist gunman pressures him to join up or pay protection money, he refuses.Pa isn’t a one-off: this is a film about family values and how they are passed on. His own father is a ‘deep ...”

“... History of China, while still taking Mao’s ideological legacy very seriously. The irony is that no one in China, neither the party leaders nor the masses, would regard the discussion of Mao’s theory as anything other than a waste of time better devoted to making money. An alternative view of Mao, which I expect we shall hear much more about during this ...”

“... Tom’s Cabin in reverse, Tolstoy’s paean for the good old aristocracy and good old serfdom. No Russian writer was so sensitive to current feeling and opinion as Dostoevsky – as his first biographer Strakhov put it, ‘he felt thought with unusual liveliness’ – or more adept at creating works of art out of his response to them, and one of the best ...”

“... husband died last January, dust clung to the model’s slackened rigging like sea fog. There was no room for it in her new flat, so my husband and I agreed to take it to our house in Glasgow. I posted a photograph of it on Twitter and in less than an hour received a message from Craig Wallace, curator of the Sogo Arts Gallery and an experienced model ...”

“... in the Parc de la Ciutadella; 16 years later he used a steel frame for his concert hall, El Palau de la Música Catalana, making it the first curtain-wall building in Spain and one of the first in the world. Both buildings sought to establish the progressive nature of the Catalan enterprise, but both are also laden with medieval ...”

“... In​ 1993 the soothsayer John Major advised that fifty years hence Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where the past is never dead but constantly honoured in reproductions of varying degrees of happy bogusness ...”

“... had coaxed him into believing that dancing was something that could be learnt. ‘There are no steps, believe me,’ he said. ‘You just have to move, and enjoy yourself.’ And this matter, of moving, and being able to enjoy it, had taken on some importance because the first Senior School Social of the year had been announced, and the date set for ...”

“... moment of his election to Parliament to the eventual achievement of his goal. One wonders whether John Major ever heard a similar message click-clacking from railway carriage wheels in the course of his extraordinary non-stop journey up the same greasy pole. There was scarcely time for him to form expectations during the interval that ran from his original ...”

“... one. Tears were, on the whole, rather approved of in our house. My father liked to say: ‘I have no time for a man who cannot weep’ (he may have been quoting Churchill). At bedtime, tears would gather in his blue-bloodshot eyes as he read his favourite poems to us. John Dowland’s ‘Weep you ...”

“... to depart from revered authorities. Under his hands plans for a church steeple or an academic hall would turn into a bold revision of Vitruvian schemes, the twitches of an anatomised dog into a startling challenge to Galenic orthodoxy, the motion of a planetary model into liberation from the ‘tyranny’ of ancient astronomy. The puzzle, now, is to ...”