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“... The British Museum – not a Museum of Britain’, so reads the caption on a photograph of the Museum’s imposing portico, at the start of a recent survey of national collections conducted by the Museums Journal. The BM is not an exhibition of the nation nor does it incorporate one coherently developed collection ...”

“... as the theorist of potent subjects like myth and symbol he mattered almost as much to the poets. So what is oddest about this capable, lively man is that, as far as literary scholarship at least is concerned, he has almost disappeared from sight. Amends are being made by the current exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, and by the collection of ...”

“... At first I thought: nothing’s changed here, nothing’s going to change. I spent part of my childhood in Greenock, and came back in 1999 to stand in next-door Port Glasgow as a candidate in the first Scottish Parliament elections. In my first spell there, the great estuary of the Clyde was lined for mile after mile with clanging, sparking shipyards, and every shop-sign in West Blackhall Street read ‘SCWS’ – Scottish Co-Operative Wholesale Society ...”

“... affinity in his collection of short stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Tower’s Americans are not so grandly freakish as O’Connor’s, but they are poor freaks in spirit: depressed rednecks, failed entrepreneurs, bitter carnies, bullied children and men on the run. As the collection’...”

“... even the drunks, have the air of Marks & Spencer management trainees. Matti Vanhanen, Finland’s cyborg-like teetotal prime minister, survived in office after ditching his mistress via text message – it’s hard to imagine Gordon Brown getting away with that. But now and again, one ...”

“... to kill. But the most impressive thing to me about Beale Street was that nobody got in anybody’s way – because every damn one of them wanted to be right there.That short ride along Beale Street turned out to be the most important experience of Phillips’s young life. Eleven years later he opened the Memphis Recording ...”

“... species of birds in Britain in a single calendar year. I never got anywhere close. There were so many more birds that I hadn’t seen than I had. I often tried to turn common birds into uncommon birds. Those house sparrows that haunted the privet hedge by the road: surely one of them was a tree sparrow? In my head there was also a list of ...”

“... In​ 1636, Diogo Antioine and Catharina Antonis appeared at a notary’s office in Amsterdam, the city where they lived. They were engaged and had already registered their marriage at city hall. Now they proceeded to draw up a will. In the presence of a Spanish interpreter, Josias Doria, they appointed three men – Christoffel Capitano, Anthony and Francisco – as their heirs ...”

“... undergraduate at Cornell in the Fifties, it was the only American university where Wittgenstein’s later work was the object of intensive study. He had died in 1951 and Philosophical Investigations was published in 1953. I remember in those pre-xerox days sharing with some fellow students the typing of The Blue Book and The ...”

“... Levy, covers ‘the Jewish trial of Jesus’; it is followed in close succession, in Levy’s account, by the Christian invention of the concept of heresy and the persecution of the Socinian and Arminian heretics and later of the Ranters, Antinomians and early Quakers. After an uncertain interval of state prosecutions and compromises in the 19th ...”

“... power, the same power that once lit the whole village, and I suppose one day might have to do so again. 8 January. I spend a lot of time these days just tidying up and today I start on my notebooks. Around 1964 I took to carrying a notebook in my pocket in which I used to jot down scraps of overheard conversation, ideas for plays or sketches and (very ...”

“... One​ of the minor disappointments about Obama was that he played golf. It’s true that most modern American presidents have liked to play golf – just about everyone from Taft to Trump can be seen with a club in his hand – but Obama was not most presidents. His immediate predecessor, George W. Bush, loved the game but felt he ought to give it up after 9/11, in case it seemed frivolous to be on the golf course when he was sending soldiers into battle ...”

“... demise. President Bush was in Saudi Arabia rallying the troops when the news broke of Thatcher’s fall. He called her at once to express his deep sympathy and his mild sense of bemusement. ‘It was quite emotional for him,’ his press secretary Marlin Fitzwater recalled. ‘He and she had put this together. And now she was going to be gone.’ Some of ...”

“... We’re confident it’s real’: Arthur Aron is a psychologist who has discovered that blood-flows in the brains of people claiming to be in love after decades of marriage resemble those of new lovers. Romance may authentically survive: ‘That’s what the brain scans are telling us ...”

“... used to be called, wield the most astonishing power in the business world and the economy. Not so many know how much power they wield over the Government. The story of Arthur Andersen, and its burgeoning power, is especially interesting. Arthur Andersen is a proud survivor of the stampede of top accountancy firms to sue each other for alleged negligence in ...”