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“... to place it in the National Gallery. In the following year he consoled himself with Piero’s St Michael, which entered the Gallery after his death. On returning from his Italian travels in 1858, Eastlake would have found his friend Austin Henry Layard working on the proofs of a long article on fresco painting which appeared that October in the Quarterly ...”

“... untamed capitalist development, indifference to the environment and disregard for disposable, non-white people has already produced lethal crises – famines, fires and floods – that we mistakenly chalk up to ‘natural causes’ or ‘acts of God’. Dead Cities, a collection of articles written between 1990 and 2002, does not limit its concerns to the ...”

“... met his family there, while my eight-year-old daughter was marvelling at his masterpiece, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. It seems strange that an artist such as Jeff Koons can include a gigantic puppy dog in his repertoire, to massive acclaim, while Sandaldjian’s minute Disney figures are admired only by a tiny group of cognoscenti. After all, as ...”

“... The horrors they witness will come as little surprise to anyone who has read Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Felicity Lawrence, Eric Schlosser or any of the previous exposés of factory-farmed meat, but they make grim and startling reading even so. If you can get beyond the title, the great virtues of Farmageddon are its global reach and eyewitness ...”

“... set the bar for ‘good business’. On 15 and 16 September he bypassed his two major dealers (White Cube and Gagosian) and auctioned 223 pieces of new work directly at Sotheby’s. The sale beat its already sky-high estimates by a substantial margin, bringing a total of £111.5 million, ten times the old record for a single-artist auction, set by Picasso ...”

“... we imagine between her face and her mask.’ The images of Doris Day (that blonde hair, those white teeth) and her personas as the spunky girl next door, the tightly wound career woman and the gung-ho housewife have been fixed for years now, but the person who played Doris Day is less clear. It’s difficult even to know what to call her. The band leader ...”

“... With its ten million members, it’s bigger than the Freemasons, the Rotarians, the TUC, the White Aryan Resistance, the Samaritans, the KKK, the Women’s Institute and – in terms of weekly attendance – the Church of England. But if AA is big, so is alcoholism. If you accept the modest estimate that 10 per cent of the adult population of this ...”

“... Waltons with such longing and attachment that I felt more a part of these families than my own. Michael Landon was my father, and I was Laura Ingalls. Even when Mary Ingalls went blind, I thought I’d rather be her than myself. As far as I was concerned, the American happy family dream was the only dream worth having. And so, I became a Mormon. Wearing a ...”

“... with those in the Jungle at Calais, but their fate certainly prefigures that of the forgotten white working class in the US and Europe. In The Golovlyov Family (1880), Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin describes how after the abolition of serfdom a sort of doom hung over the minor gentry as ‘divorced from the stream of life, and without a position of ...”

“... he gave respect and appreciation to such various talents as Ian Fleming and Dick Francis, Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell – all British writers. It is hard to believe that he hadn’t read, at some time between its first British publication in 1943 and the writing of ‘High Windows’ in 1967, a book by the writer regarded by many as the American ...”

“... publicity ‘toxic’ and mistrusted the incestuousness of New York literary circles: ‘great white sharks fighting over a bathtub, you know?’ He had other reasons for wanting to stay out west. A former ‘near great’ junior tennis player and adolescent ‘math-wienie’ – in the words of an essay written for Harper’s in 1991 – he loved the ...”

“... and might not; and then, in noticeably poorer country, Irish Republic tricolours, their green-white-orange optimistically symbolising reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant. Signs reading UDA and RIRA (both, in our understanding, illegal organisations) suggested that Ireland is not quite there yet, as did our first roadblock, between Armagh and ...”

“... buffalo, eland, impala, leopard, lion, warthog and waterbuck. Handy information, too, that ‘white rhino are sometimes allocated for culling by the Natal Parks Board’ and that in South Africa ‘trophy fees are only charged for animals bagged or “wounded and lost”.’ The politics of the guide’s author and intended readers is indicated in the ...”

“... Seabrook says, as Kosoville). Walking with Seabrook along the shore at Margate, subjected to the white noise of puns, submerged quotations, barks of self-intoxicated laughter, is to understand the manifold potentialities of the word ‘front’. North Sea, First War, BNP, con, flash. Seabrook is a very mouthy writer, his rude tongue perpetually thrust into ...”

“... The best book I know on the relationship between sporting culture and success is Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s account of the 2002 Oakland A’s baseball team.† The argument is compellingly simple: sports teams are run like gentlemen’s clubs rather than businesses, and clubs don’t base their business decisions on facts but on codes and ...”