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“... Diebenkorn remembered helping him hang a show of his work in 1947. But like Elmer Bischoff and David Park, with whom he made the turn to figurative painting a few years later, Diebenkorn was asking questions that abstract expressionism couldn’t always answer, even though, as the early works in the show at the Royal Academy (until 7 June) suggest, he was ...”

“... his voice as he shouts? A police car, lights on, is parked behind him. Beyond the car the black-green of a band of trees is broken by a few bright spots; they could be streetlights or house lights half-obscured by foliage. It must be night time. Are they crime-scene floodlights that shine across the lake, on the man, grass, rocks and car? Although the ...”

“... personal recollections, letters, photographs, newspaper reports and other contemporary documents. David Pryce-Jones has gone to immense trouble to sustain this pretence, and he is clearly a connoisseur of the times and the culture he has set out to portray. The end effect has a certain virtuosity, but it is also irritatingly mannered and artificial. The book ...”

“... liquid bottle (‘cleans, no added promises’) on a fire. Words rear up and loom enormous – David Cameron, for example, may find this with his plan for ‘thrifty government’ – and fizz and collapse and make a nasty smell. It is, I take it, obvious that one of the many things no one particularly needs at the moment is a book that tells you how to ...”

“... Baghdad, and that the Iraqi army could not get them out. Earlier that month Barack Obama had told David Remnick of the New Yorker that, compared to al-Qaida, IS was a junior varsity basketball team playing out of its league; a few months later its fighters emerged from the desert to defeat six Iraqi army divisions and capture Mosul. Wary of making the same ...”

“... Ican list​ a hundred things David Foster Wallace should have written before he wrote a book about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers ...”

“... at Bafta. These sorry occasions have always been best forgotten; now their memory must be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in ...”

“... spinster. He conjured up, without benefit of a brass section, life on a Midsomer Murders village green: it was a social prophylactic to curb the excesses of the time, sexual and fiscal, and to herald a return to family values. Neither of these conservative philosophers, Major or Tebbit, appreciated the inflammatory effect that bicycles have on the ...”

“... film sealed between the glass sheets turns the daylight scarlet, turquoise, sharp yellow, light green and bluish mauve. The array seems to distil many of the experiences of colour currently on offer in urban Britain. It translates the patterns of dresses, T-shirts, shopping bags and car paint passing along the Horseferry Road; it’s echoed by commercial ...”

“... Current Biography, July 1976. Edgar L. Doctorow was born in New York City on 6 January 1931 to David R. and Rose Doctorow, whom he has described as ‘old-fashioned social democrats’. His grandparents on both sides were Jewish immigrants from Russia. Doctorow grew up on Eastburn Avenue, in the Bronx. His mother was a pianist and his father had a store in ...”

“... If this is the case when the ‘facts’ are right, how much more so when they are wrong? Hugh David’s book about Stephen Spender misleads in every way, factually as well as aesthetically, although in the general welter of disinformation it is barely possible to distinguish fact from treatment. As David’s previous ...”

“... Greens were saying? When I went to a local bookshop to buy the election manifestos, there was no Green manifesto for sale. I can’t say the manifestos made riveting reading, but they were marginally illuminating. The Labour Manifesto, at 28 pages of small type and some pictures, cost a pound. The Liberal Democrat Manifesto, at 50 pages of largish type, some ...”

“... parties. The key portfolios in the new government went to the members of Shamir’s Likud Party. David Levy, a populist of Moroccan origins, became Foreign Minister. Mr Levy does not speak English. But since little more than a dialogue of the deaf with the United States was likely on the peace process, this was not considered a severe handicap. Moshe ...”

“... It would be interesting to place Jay McInerney and David Holbrook as neighbours at E.M. Forster’s imaginary table. Both novelists are fascinated by decadence – that much they have in common. But their diagnoses and anatomies of the decadent condition are quite different; worlds apart, to use Holbrook’s dominant image ...”

“... that no one’s going to make it policy any time soon. What, then, of the ‘new creative or green economies’ we keep hearing so much about? ‘A fantasy,’ Sennett says, in his new book, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-Operation. We are in the middle of a ‘massive drift of jobs away from the West’, a world-historical economic ...”