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“... in Europe continued to do well after the war. Nicholas writes that the director of the Tate, John Rothenstein, rushed to Paris with Kenneth Clark in 1944, expecting to find impoverished French collectors and dealers eager to sell pictures at bargain prices. Instead they found (in Clark’s words) ‘a sense of prosperity and social gaiety, which made ...”

“... the London pictures, paintings from 1618 through to the late 1620s, include religious subjects (St John on Patmos, The Immaculate Conception) and genre pieces (The Water-Seller of Seville, Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary). The genre pictures are lit, it seems, by an afternoon sunlight which penetrates dark rooms, strikes highlights ...”

“... by life in small groups and communities.’ In spite of the scepticism of their betters – John Locke thought that ‘a middle-aged plough-man’ could ‘scarce ever be brought to the carriage … of a gentleman, though his body be as well proportioned, and his joints as supple’ – it’s clear to anyone who’s read the words of the ‘lesser ...”

“... Assembly and the London mayoral contest were notable examples. Well before the 2001 election, John Kampfner described Cook as an isolated figure forced to recognise both that he would never succeed Blair as party leader, and that he had been decisively out-manoeuvred by his long-term political rival Gordon ...”

“... round Pasternak precisely because his psychology did not mesh with it, because of what Edward Brown in Russian Literature since the Revolution calls ‘his long exile inside himself’. Brown’s beautifully informative study, now republished in a revised and considerably enlarged version, is incidentally a storehouse ...”

“... wrote. There are 14 figures in the picture, each with a life of its own, and yet the interior, brown and muddy and variously lit, has a character, too: a habitat but also a living museum of past and present cares. ‘Painting out of the Ordinary: Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life’ (Yale, £45), a wonderful new book by David Solkin, points out that ...”

“... the same thing does not happen again. One of Ratushinskaya’s poems describes a dream in which John the Baptist appears in the Gulag, filthy and ragged, and is succoured by one of the female inmates before he gets ready to fly away. She longs for a miracle, to see her daughter, and begs him to perform it. But he is silent, weeping, and she wakes up from a ...”

“... never be construed as substantive: it was, by definition, procedural. The distinguished jurist John Hart Ely considered substantive due process an oxymoron, just like ‘green pastel redness’. Some conservatives asked whether abortion rights were conjured out of judicial subjectivity and caprice.Strangely, in retrospect, at the time of Roe v. Wade ...”

“... there are two skeletons. Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant, faces the front. His skeleton, tainted brown because of the speed and secrecy of its preparation, is seven feet ten inches tall. So towering are the bones, and so impossibly hefty is their accompanying leather boot, that it’s easy to walk past without noticing the adjacent filigree form. Mounted at ...”

“... for the Megaliths’ by Paul Nash (1935) ‘The Destruction of Pompei and Herculaneum’ by John Martin (1822) ‘Sketch for Hadleigh Castle’ by John Constable (1828-9)PreviousNext Within it there are tantalising themes. The one which the Tate’s collection is best suited to develop is England’s relationship with ...”

“... merely pretending. Much of this ‘renewal’ had, of course, been achieved by Neil Kinnock and John Smith, while the numerical and political decline of the unions, together with a change in the composition of the electorate and the Labour Party’s membership, made ‘renewal’ much easier and, at least to some extent, necessary. Nevertheless, Mr Blair ...”

“... humour.’ After spending the harsh winter of 1885 digging ditches, Tesla met two men – Alfred Brown, a senior official in the Western Union telegraph company, and the lawyer Charles Peck – who helped him to become a major force in the War of the Currents. Impressed by his capability and charisma, Brown and Peck went ...”

“... squeamish about dispensing with such footling restrictions, left-of-centre figures such as Cook, John Prescott, Margaret Beckett and Chris Smith have been allowed to surround themselves with like-minded ministers. The man who has replaced the Blairite factotum Stephen Byers, for example, in charge of minimum wage and trade-union rights, is Ian McCartney ...”

“... 1960s were a great era of collage in all sorts of media: not just Robert Rauschenberg, but also John Ashbery and Bob Dylan. For Barthelme, it wasn’t simply a matter of playing with found forms or language. That was ‘cheapo surrealism’. Instead his stories explore situations (‘The Party’, ‘Brain Damage’, ‘City Life’) that are experienced as ...”

“... perpetuates their dispassionate perspectives and erases their victims all over again.Black and brown men and women were by the later 17th century hardly an uncommon sight in London, especially in the East End, with its mariners and merchants. Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors (2017) tells the stories of free Africans living in England: ...”