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“... supporters are the prime minister of Israel and the mayor of Jerusalem – but rather what he means by putting our own interests first. He said America would not seek ‘to impose our way of life on anyone’, which seems a clear warning against nation-building such as Bush and Obama attempted in Afghanistan. Yet the tone of the speech and the tone of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Is Said to Have Mulled Russia Channel – Trump Tower Meeting – Aim was a Secret Means for Communications During Transition.’ Those lines say all that the story has to say – the channel was never established. But they strung it out to seven short paragraphs based on a leak from ‘three people with knowledge of the discussion’. Fourteen ...”

“... In J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Disgrace, which is set in a violent post-apartheid South Africa, David Lurie, a Cape Town academic, reaches a similar conclusion when his daughter Lucy is gang-raped by three black men at her isolated homestead in the Eastern Cape. ‘But why did they hate me so?’ Lucy asks. ‘I had never set eyes on them.’ ‘It was ...”

“... no talking, coughing, clearing of the throat, or any movement whatsoever of the lips. As David Thomson remarks in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, this was a life ‘so primed for legend, it leaves one feeling that the doleful, suspicious Hughes had some hygienic plan for missing life altogether and going straight into myth’. Hughes was, after ...”

“... which is now universally referred to as rilievo schiacciato (squashed or mangled relief). By this means, aerial perspective was introduced into sculpture for the first time – and almost in advance of its reintroduction into painting. But we also find reliefs in both bronze and marble which are composed of figures crushed into the front plane. These might ...”

“... member, I have now read, in addition to the biography, the full-length critical studies by David Mikics and James Naremore, watched Jan Harlan’s excellent documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, and explored every entry in The Stanley Kubrick Archives edited by Alison Castle: a 13-pound art-historical tome containing solid articles on every ...”

“... rendered almost three million of the country’s 14 million Kurds homeless – and they have by no means finished. When I first came to Diyarbakir, I had no inkling of Turkey’s attitude to its Kurdish community. I swallowed the official line that the region had been closed because of the Soviet threat to Nato’s eastern flank. Kurds were merely colourful ...”

“... slabs of plangent sound steadily ringing out. A Pollock affects us through the abundance of its means, a Newman through the sparingness of its means. The slight curve in a band of colour in Adam suffices to evoke a human figure moving. Almost all the surface of Eve is a vermilion rectangle, but this appears to contain so ...”

“... the rhythm steadies them as they climb near their limits: it gives them something to focus on, a means of earthing their rational fears and their neuroses. And in Mountain for July/August 1978 there is a photo of one American climber reading the Bhagavad-Ghita to another on a granite face in New Hampshire. Each one of us has a threshold beyond which we feel ...”

“... century, that anyone could have won the bid without recourse to questionable, not to say illegal, means. We know that since at least France 1998, bribes, presents and favours have been handed out by every successful World Cup host. The Sunday Times investigation into the bid concluded that Qatar is no different. As for alcohol, weak beer from one of Fifa’s ...”

“... nation. This transition is one of the most remarkable events of the post-war years and, as David Gilmour says in what is by far the best general account of the phenomenon to have appeared so far, it was the King who made it possible. The greatest threat to Spanish democracy came, and still comes, from the Army. Franco had risen to power through the ...”

“... a bit remote, severe with himself but gentle to others, capable of laughter but ‘by no means a party animal’. The meta-message of Coetzee’s co-operation comes across as ‘nothing much to see here’, and that’s mostly the case with the biography too. The same can’t be said of Here and Now, a collection of communications between Coetzee and ...”

“... true. The major problem is that when Stern writes about the historic importance of individuals he means several quite different things at once. The least convincing claim concerns those individuals who ‘by themselves’ shaped world history. I doubt whether Stern really believes that the personal will of tyrants adequately explains the barbarities of our ...”

“... can apply to time as well as space, but it’s sad that Weight and Measure will stay – which means, being site-specific, exist – for so short a time. Ironically, it has the look of a great ...”