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“... is a public art it takes on ‘a distinctively democratic character’. Here ‘democratic’ means anything popular, anything that a number of people might talk about, regardless of its content. But there is another meaning of democracy running through the book, and a more exalted one: the collective solidarity and sense of communal life that the utopian ...”

“... much zest into a feeble allegory. In his excellent critical biography of Tati, published in 1999, David Bellos points out that less than three years before he began shooting the film (in May 1947) the Gestapo still had an office on the main square of Sainte-Sévère. And now American movies and military policemen are the problem?Many of the best scenes in ...”

“... still considers itself ‘Britain’s most prestigious literary accolade’ (whatever that means), won’t be bestowed until 17 October, and the shortlist isn’t due till mid-September, but the hype began to trundle back in February, when the judges were announced. Whoever wins the Booker takes home £9000 less than the winner of the Orange ...”

“... A student had decided to write something about London poetry – was there any? He’d toyed with David Gascoyne’s A Vagrant (‘They’re much the same in most ways, these great cities’), but decided that Paris was the principal focus there. He couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for the post-Olsonian outpourings of the Seventies, most notably Allen ...”

“... of Political Thought (1982). For me (born in 1931) and for many of my generation, ‘Fascism’ means a system of government which angers us and reminds us of the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini. A fear of ‘Fascism’ was quite natural in 1968, that year of wild crowds and top people’s plots. I was interviewed by a Swiss television team: ‘Don’t you ...”

“... Shelley, need not be read as simple Neoplatonism: both use idealist language strategically, as a means of averting both mechanical materialism and conventional religious discourse. Gish complains that the poem’s unifying symbol, the curly snake alluded to in the title, is not concretely present: but rather than playing a futile game of hunt-the-serpent it ...”

“... and powerful than any that Thomson and his contemporaries can have had nightmares about, the means of catering for the often startlingly expensive tastes of that justly discriminating public can no longer be taken for granted. In that sense, the popular success of Górecki constitutes a threat distinctly different from that of a Philip Glass or a Steve ...”

“... also took an interest in towns and villages, and in what was to be apprehended there by some means other than transparency. We might think of that interest as an interest in the virtual realities produced either by a change in the position of the observer, or by a machine: The least change in our point of view, gives the whole world a pictorial air. A ...”

“... sort of connection. When he writes that ‘the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good,’ he means that the one relates to the other by way of a set of analogies: as the one pleases immediately, so does the other; as the one assumes a universality it can never (and need not) prove, so does the other, and so on. He does not say that one leads to the ...”

“... There are obvious overlaps between the Orbán and Trump playbooks – from winning elections by means of right-wing populism, via gerrymandering, packing the courts and attacking civil society institutions, to claiming to be the sole defender of national sovereignty. Like Trumpism, Orbánism pits city against country – in Hungary, ‘the people of the ...”

“... madeira and then puts on ‘a damask night-gown (at that period a loose informal coat, not what it means today) over his long waistcoat and breeches. He has also taken his wig off, revealing that he is shaven-headed to the apparent point, in the poor light, of baldness; and indeed looks like nothing so much as a modern skinhead, did not his clothes deny ...”

“... David Sylvester, who contributed regularly to this paper, died last June. People who worked with him usually agree that he was the most engaged and patient looker at art they ever knew. Robert Rosenblum rightly says, in David Sylvester: The Private Collection, that there was something comical about his high seriousness, but it is also true that, ‘unlike the rest of us ironists’, he could make one feel (or at least feel one ought to feel) that ‘art might matter more than life itself ...”

“... that Oxford should not be unrepresented, history for them simply the Boat Race carried on by other means.28 February. At the National Theatre to discuss a possible adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, I run into Tony Harrison the poet. He talks about Trackers, the play he has written and is directing about two papyrologists who piece together the fragments ...”

“... the new study of forensics had given the police, ‘the principle of the trace and so on’. As David Gibson recounts in Planting Clues, Locard was also a keen botanist. One of the scores of cases he included in his textbooks described a man who had been found murdered in the countryside outside Lyon. A group of suspects was rounded up. Inspecting one of ...”

“... to fry). To write about the works of Hazlitt, one needs a bias towards history and philosophy. David Bromwich’s study concentrates on the latter discipline, for he is appraising Hazlitt’s understanding of Abstract Ideas and his command of words to express them. But there is also a historical theme running through this excellent book, accompanying the ...”