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“... In the preface to his new edition of montaged interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester draws our attention to what has become the last section of the fifth interview. Altogether, there are seven interviews but Sylvester considers the end of the fifth to be the most illuminating passage in the book: ‘I always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance … I think perhaps I am unique in that way; and perhaps it’s a vanity to say such a thing ...”

“... of fascinating studies, ranging from Babylon to 20th-century Ghana, from China to Madagascar. David Cannadine, in his Introduction, says that the topics covered are mainly pre-modern and therefore outside the scope of most professional historians. In their Acknowledgments, however, the two editors refer to the ‘rites of passage’ of contemporary heads ...”

“... in three periods of 14 generations apiece (not even Vermes knows why). He begins with Abraham and David and departs from ancient practice in naming five women in his list. One of these is Mary, the mother of Jesus. The others are all non-Jews, and three of them are associated with marital irregularities: Tamar seduced her father-in-law, Rahab was a ...”

“... have been a death-blow to the Obama presidency; its passage has given him time to discover the means for a renewal of presidential energy. Yet the bill passed without a single Republican vote, and its revisions, augmentations and delays, many of them prompted by Obama in a vain search for bipartisan support, made the process a textbook example of ...”

“... word is ‘monist’) EU has encouraged western Ukrainians to raise the bar for what it means to be Ukrainian, effectively excluding the Russian-speakers of the east, on the vexed and divisive issues of language, culture and – most of all – the collision between the present and the past. On the language question, it’s true that in Ukraine an ...”

“... books complement one another uncannily, as though the authors, like the two campus novelists in David Lodge’s Small World, had agreed to divide up the world between them. By secret treaty, as it were, O’Keeffe got to do facts, and Edwards opinions. The opinions, it should at once be said, are the fruit of immense dedication. Edwards has written widely ...”

“... a fact the prosperous neoliberal consensus lightly brushed off. Non-fanatical Americans of modest means have wondered how their children will pay for the emergency measures we are buying now but refusing to tax ourselves for. Early suspicion of the bank bail-outs found a ready target of displaced resentment in the later demand for health insurance ...”

“... with many literary historians the belief that there is progress in the arts, and that progress means specifically advances in technique. Picasso, Proust and Eliot from this point of view ‘do not work any more (or are positively harmful)’. In any but the conventional terms of progressive storytelling, one would be hard-pressed to say just what sort of ...”

“... unambiguous benchmark against which other less clear-cut positions can be measured, an unequivocal means of sorting out the interventionists from the free-marketeers. It is nothing of the sort. Nothing about arts funding is unambiguous or clear-cut. It is of course true that the market will always have its unequivocal champions, like Tyler Cowen, who argues ...”

“... most societies throughout history and in all societies some of the time, censorship has been the means by which a ruling group or a visible majority cleanses the channels of communication to ensure that certain conventional practices will go on operating undisturbed. It is not only traditional cultures that see the point of taboos on speech and expressive ...”

“... those who support Save Britain’s Heritage know only too well. We live in a retrospective age and David Lowenthal’s discursive study is a product of it. One of the attractions of this book is that it enables the Melton Constables of the world to be seen in the context of the future as well as the past. David Lowenthal is ...”

“... This​ is a dry and dutiful book which reads like a ghost story. The person being haunted is David Cameron. Theresa May grew up in a Cotswolds village called Church Enstone, where her father was vicar for much of the 1960s. The vicarage is within five miles of what became Cameron’s constituency home when he was MP for Witney and is roughly the same distance from what is now Soho Farmhouse, a members’ club, a little piece of the metropolis that is a haven for the Chipping Norton set ...”

“... distrust between the two governments. Diplomacy was now conducted not only between states but by means of innumerable conferences in Europe’s resorts and spas – ‘casino politics’, as Raymond Poincaré disparagingly called them – as well as the League of Nations. Finally, there was a larger cast of actors. During the 1920s new states in Eastern ...”

“... to control angry crowds . But appearances were more than a matter of policing. They were a means of marking, symbolically, the shift from the old to the new, but were also assumed to have transformative value. To some extent they still do: a uniform marks someone’s official function (soldier, policeman, doorman), but also encourages the modes of ...”

“... a key part of the story. The exclusion of Josef Albers shows bias. The exclusion of Mark di Suvero means the omission of the one artist (David Smith is something else) who has created a sculptural equivalent of Abstract Expressionism, the movement which forms the nucleus of the exhibition. The exclusion of Chuck ...”