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“... the ‘deeper thinkers’ of the 1870s, carrying forward the social conscience of Dickens, while John Everett Millais, no less than his French homonym, possessed a manner affectingly and ‘personally intimate’.In chasing the works that Van Gogh looked at in London, the Tate exhibition takes us on some journeys in taste. It is easy enough to be stirred by ...”

“... to make room for the growing number of press attendees. Or of the lowlier ones at least: each major news organisation is allocated a few blue badges that permit entry into the courtroom itself, and the senior figures grab them. It’s nice to learn who is the biggest wig at the BBC and who ignores whom, and nice to watch the ITN team huddle on the steps ...”

“... billboard ads appeared on many buildings, not only in Shanghai but in Beijing, Guangzhou and most major cities in China. The media, including the cultural TV channels, went to town on the book – and Dai – and there was an international symposium on Finnegans Wake at last year’s Shanghai Book Fair, feeding yet another round of media frenzy. With such a ...”

“... on each of these days 20,000 people were unable to receive their scheduled supply. According to John Ging, the director of UNRWA in Gaza, most of the people who get food aid are entirely dependent on it. On 18 December UNRWA suspended all food distribution for both emergency and regular programmes because of the blockade. The WFP has had similar ...”

“... feel the lack of a clear definition. Tantra isn’t a religion, but it profoundly transformed two major religions, Hinduism and Buddhism. It isn’t about sex, but it’s shot through with sexuality. Its practitioners range from hucksterish wandering mystics to kings, from celibate monks to rock stars. Scholars frequently point to the word’s etymology ...”

“... and in New York, Dia was funded by his wife, Philippa de Menil, daughter of Dominique de Menil, a major patron and heir to the Schlumberger fortune (made from drill bits for oil wells). Along with a third collaborator, a young art historian called Helen Winkler, Friedrich and de Menil saw that this new work had opened a structural gap in the art world ...”

“... opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their baptisms is documented, nor the date of their ...”

“... insight. One only has to compare his setting of Keats’s sonnet ‘To Sleep’ with, say, John Tavener’s setting of Blake’s ‘The Lamb’, to appreciate this. Tavener’s setting is original, attractively naive, touching, but it leaves one with the feeling that it is just one of many ways in which music could be fitted to these particular ...”

“... port, Chilean wine and so forth. One of the number could never get enough of the joke. This was John Braine, whose special party-trick was the skipping of ironic bits. When he said that England these days was run by the trade unions and the pansies, he meant it. When he went on about treason and the intellectuals there was grim, literal relish in his ...”

“... to know. He is often very funny. There are hilarious set-pieces at the expense of, for example, John Braine and Paul Johnson. For the Sake of Argument is not an easy book to précis. There are eight parts and 72 essays, the allocation of which is somewhat random. Most of the pieces in ‘Rogues’ Gallery’, for instance, could go equally well into ...”

“... whole event in some sane perspective? They cannot retreat into a grand carelessness until they are John le Carré or John Fowles. They might begin, however, by running through the list of previous winners and working out how many of the last 19 would feature in any ‘true’ list of Top 19 Novels 1969-87. They might observe ...”

“... New York journal on 18 February. This was not a new sentiment in the United States. In 1823 John Quincy Adams had suggested that ‘there are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation,’ so all New World Newtons ought to know what to do: if an apple, severed by the tempest from its native tree, cannot choose but fall to the ...”

“... came the Second World War and a sudden upsurge in reputation, with Maurice Bowra, Stephen Spender, John Piper, Kenneth Clark, John Lehmann and others going hysterical about her: a kind of trendy Stringalong situation, we are invited to judge. Then by 1954 it is all over and the balloon deflated for good. Can my dislike of ...”

“... with Dr Küng is a little like chiding the Third International for not adopting the principles of John Stuart Mill in its dealings with Lukacs. And when therefore John Paul II – who, like Evelyn Waugh, as Randolph Churchill remarked to an earlier Pope, is himself a Roman Catholic – did not respond to Dr Küng’s ...”

“... been known to scholars for some time and which include the Gospel of Mary and the Apocryphon of John, they are the first large-scale and direct presentation of Gnostic beliefs: hitherto nearly all our knowledge has come from the descriptions (abusive but on the whole accurate) and excerpts given by their orthodox opponents. The roots of Gnosticism, a widely ...”