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“... airless space. I hated it, and only went inside a couple of times, probably dared by my brother, Alexander. Daddy always walked straight past it. A bit further on, next to a lock, there was an even smaller pillbox, but I never got beyond putting my foot in the doorway.When we asked Daddy what these pillboxes were for, he said they had been put there during ...”

“... speaks the exuberant and strangely wooden children’s chorus of the Middle German poet Der Wilde Alexander: ‘Here we ran swilling strawberries/from oak to pine,/through hedges, through turnstiles –/so long as day was burning down’ (‘Children’). He gruffs out a rather Bukowskian Rimbaud: ‘But it was terrific when the house-girl/with her ...”

“... a New York gallery of Sots Art, an ironic appropriation of ‘socialist’ art by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, into trying to understand the deeper significance of Socialist Realism. This fascinating book swoops and lurches from topic to topic, but the reader’s feeling of disorientation is more than compensated for by the exhilaration of the ...”

“... 1960 in Art and Illusion, and a similar equipoise was subsequently maintained in the writings of Michael Baxandall. But how long can you keep a department running by reference to a certain tone of voice? A greater security for its onward operation, a sounder status in academic bargaining, seemed promised by the panoramic critiques of authorship that were ...”

“... the statements of the three friends she denounced as terrorists, Joseph Mooney, Brendan Magill and Alexander Rowntree. In long interviews, all three men had convinced the police that they had no connection at all with any terrorist organisation or any bombing. Yet at the trial their Irish names were left dangling in the air. To the jury they were ...”

“... the founder of Zionism, in the course of which Witte remarked: ‘I used to say to the late Tsar, Alexander III, “Majesty, if it were possible to drown the six or seven million Jews in the Black Sea, I would be absolutely in favour of that. But if it is not possible, one must let them live.’” Witte’s reasoning was that the Jews were poor, therefore ...”

“... to the DNB. The rationale of this remains obscure, and in this volume robs us of Nigel Nicolson on Alexander, A.J.P. Taylor on Beaverbrook, Martin Gilbert on Churchill, Jonathan Dimbleby on his father, John Pearson on Ian Fleming, P.N. Furbank on E.M. Forster, Philip Williams on Gaitskell, Sybille Bedford on Aldous Huxley, ...”

“... to understand Putin? The intellectual power behind the throne is the ‘Eurasianist’ philosopher Alexander Dugin, talked up by Western pundits as ‘the most dangerous philosopher in the world’. Bolsonaro? Study Olavo de Carvalho, self-taught Brazilian philosopher, former astrologer and chain-smoking conspiracy theorist. Even now, we are told that the man ...”

“... to place it in the National Gallery. In the following year he consoled himself with Piero’s St Michael, which entered the Gallery after his death. On returning from his Italian travels in 1858, Eastlake would have found his friend Austin Henry Layard working on the proofs of a long article on fresco painting which appeared that October in the Quarterly ...”

“... In​ Peeping Tom (1960), Michael Powell’s brutal parable on the nature of film, a woman confronts a young cameraman, Mark, in his darkroom. Mrs Stephens, who is blind, realises there’s something disturbing about Mark, something linked to his compulsive filmmaking. ‘I’m listening to my instinct now. And it says: “All this filming isn’t healthy ...”

“... they face unpleasant questions from the US Department of Commerce.But,​ as Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis argue in their brilliant polemic Trade Wars Are Class Wars, industrial policy instruments are only part of the story. The more fundamental reason for the Sino-American trade imbalance is macroeconomic. When we look at the world economy as a whole ...”

“... Dáil Éireann was proscribed in September 1919. In the subsequent guerrilla warfare of 1919-21 Michael Collins, the Minister for Finance and Director of Intelligence of the Volunteers or Irish Republican Army, rose to prominence. In 1920 Britain established Home Rule states – one substantive, comprising the six Unionist-majority north-eastern ...”

“... sleep more than five hours a night, though in practice they seldom had time for more – but as Alexander Stille’s amazing excavation of their largely hidden history makes clear, the piece mostly erred on the side of understatement, so extreme was the megalomania of the group’s patriarch and his associates.The project began with noble intentions, at ...”

“... in the UK’s response to the pandemic, the government’s messengers were richly rewarded. Michael Gove’s Cabinet Office gave Topham Guerin a £3 million contract for communications work. The contract – agreed without any competitive tendering – was signed in early May but, unusually, backdated to 17 March, two days before Lee Cain’s Zoom ...”

“... January 1789, when it caused a sensation. When one reads it now, in this excellent new edition by Michael Sonenscher, where it appears for the first time in English alongside the other pamphlets Sieyès wrote in 1788, it is still easy to see why. It is not a beautiful or polished piece of writing, it is poorly organised and it is probably too long for what it ...”