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“... in the name of the ‘members of the Hungarian nation’: ‘We are proud that our King St Stephen a thousand years ago placed the Hungarian state on stable foundations, and made our fatherland a part of Christian Europe … We recognise the role of Christianity in conserving the nation.’ The grandiloquent constitutional flourishes were backed up by ...”

“... Stephen Kotkin​ ’s Stalin is all paradox. He is pockmarked and physically unimpressive, yet charismatic; a gambler, but cautious; undeterred by the prospect of mass bloodshed, but with no interest in personal participation. Cynical about everyone else’s motives, he himself ‘lived and breathed ideals’. Suspicious of ‘fancy-pants intellectuals’, he was an omnivorous reader whose success in getting the Russian creative intelligentsia into line was ‘uncanny ...”

“... few other ‘viable places of worship’. London. Writing a review of Auden in Love, I come across Stephen Spender’s story of how Auden made Spender pay for the cigarettes he had bummed off him on Ischia. Spender points out that at other times Auden could be conspicuously generous, on one occasion giving Spender £50 towards a pony for his daughter. This ...”

“... discussions on philosophy and literature:He compared himself explicitly to Leopold Bloom and me to Stephen Dedalus, adding, ‘Every writer needs a guide, a father figure’ … Even more provincial, and marginal to Europe, than Dublin was in the early 20th century, was Calcutta at the century’s close. Trams, rickshaws, markets, office buildings with wide ...”

“... Turkish carpet of a similar date to those portrayed in Larkin’s portraits. Strike a Pose: Stephen Farthing and the Swagger Portrait (until 3 November), mounted to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the gift of the Suffolk Collection to the nation, offers an opportunity to consider Larkin’s portraits afresh. This imaginative exhibition juxtaposes seven ...”

“... of study joining the little red schoolhouse, Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Wall Street, Andy Warhol, the hamburger and Gypsy Rose Lee. In this mixed company, GWTW teeters erratically between Yankee high finance and a chaste, if manipulative stripper. Noticeably the only film on the list, GWTW is a national memorial to American ...”

“... Something in the cool, sun-stippled hazel grove I don’t understand – a low wall made of dressed stone, large thin flat slabs, no mortar, but packed with small stones to bind them. Then the remains of a lower wall running up against it, making the corner of a rectangle. I pull away moss and earth, and find a stone-paved floor, the hazel bushes growing up through it ...”

“... a steel frame for his concert hall, El Palau de la Música Catalana, making it the first curtain-wall building in Spain and one of the first in the world. Both buildings sought to establish the progressive nature of the Catalan enterprise, but both are also laden with medieval motifs, reminders of former greatness, of the time before 1492 and the beginning ...”

“... Why does every home not have a whole wall of encyclopedias, now that we supposedly live in the Information Age? Why have they failed to establish themselves as indispensable items of furniture, against the competition of electronic gadgetry? Because they are contenting themselves with just giving information, instead of sharpening it, so that it points somewhere ...”

“... the trio slides imperceptibly into a quartet in Garber’s musings: ‘Like the missing “fourth wall” in proscenium theatre, where the illusion is of an audience looking in on a reality that doesn’t look back, this third leg or side of the triangle is more active and more determinative than it may at first appear.’ For, if both of the two original ...”

“... really only tests his characters’ marriage with conundrums. When it looks like Katie’s lover, Stephen, might start causing some serious trouble, he is politely asked to leave – and he does. The beauty of Simon Armitage’s new novel is that it’s prepared to face up to things. But then of course Armitage has the great advantage of coming from West ...”

“... they were essentially the same thing (‘Does this mean the return of the biographical subject?’ Stephen Bann disingenuously asks in his Introduction), as if writing were just a feeble disguise for lived experience. Proust evokes the death of a grandmother, but we all know he means his mother. The objection to this kind of stuff is not that we want to deny ...”

“... learning that his doctor was coming through the next room, and turning his body violently to the wall to exclaim in exasperation and despair: ‘Oh, that ass!’ Beethoven came to rely heavily on young Gerhard, whom he variously called ‘Hosenknopf’ (‘trouser button’), because he stuck so closely to his father, and Ariel; and not merely for running ...”

“... pressing in on the place of reprieve. But it would be foolish to claim this happened very often. Stephen Coppel, the British Museum’s curator, has included here and there among the Vollard plates things from the museum’s collection that might help us take the measure of Picasso’s borrowing. There is a massive head of Hercules, a Greek vase featuring a ...”

“... markets have brought to a close the ‘century of labour’ (1875-1975) and corroborated the Wall Street reading of the Manifesto: capitalism has now become truly inexorable, having overcome all the obstacles in its path, including the working-class militancy and solidarity on which Marx naively relied. Whatever the merit of this diagnosis, the Manifesto ...”