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“... than a man, subsisted on boiled eggs, cooked 50 at a time while he was boiling his glue, studied a wall on which sick persons had used to spit, imagining that he saw there fantastic cities and combats of horses. Moreover he would never suffer his fruit trees to be pruned or trained, and so on. Vasari improves the story by arguing that there was method in ...”

“... This morning there is a man in a short black coat running across a high brick wall; a hunchbacked fly springing sticky-fingered from perch to perch, before dropping heavily into the street. The wall – weathered yellow brick grouted with carbon deposits and grime – is enough of a barrier to have doubled in television films, cop shows or faked documentaries as the exterior of a prison ...”

“... and diplomats have been more indulgent, though not everyone shares the glorious certainty of Sir Richard Evans, British Ambassador in Beijing from 1984 to 1988. He concludes that for most Chinese the Beijing massacre is a ‘blemish’ on a record that is ‘much more white than black’. Western governments were obliged to put Chinese human rights on their ...”

“... nothing he wanted to include. On his way out, however, he noticed two paintings turned to face the wall. The gallery owner explained that they were not worth seeing, but Janis insisted. ‘What a shock I received!’ he later wrote. ‘In the centre of this rather square canvas, two round eyes … were returning my stare! They belonged to a strangely ...”

“... not written into any contract: self-respect, stability, social standing. Work is ‘a road’, as Richard Sennett once wrote, ‘to the unification of the self’. Except that it doesn’t usually end up like that, which is the reason the next page of the Guardian has Jeremy Bullmore, a sage and doleful-looking ‘agony uncle’, fielding people’s problems ...”

“... built in the mid-16th century, as the ne plus ultra of aspirational timber framing. The carpenter, Richard Dale, whose name appears with that of the owner, William Moreton, on one of the windows, gave the framing a raking design which creates on the exterior an elaborate dazzle effect. Starting out with an H-plan house, Dale and Moreton added every latest ...”

“... one, so I could at least engage in the fantasy: the emperor’s new clothes. In 1955, the Wall Street Journal described the shop as ‘Dickensian’, with an ‘atmosphere that reeks of a timeless and slightly regal splendour’. It still has a faded grandeur, more like an atelier than a showroom, with acres of tweed bundled in precarious bales. The ...”

“... the audience’s suspension of disbelief,’ Franco wrote in a piece about the project for the Wall Street Journal, ‘because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn’t belong to the incredibly stylised world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognised, a real person in a ...”

“... century. The drawings are gathered together in The Four Books on Architecture (Robert Tavernor and Richard Schofield’s 1997 translation is the most recent), which are still a source for modern architects. Palladio’s origins may explain his books’ directness. He worked with his hands – he was a stone carver until he was 30 years old – and came ...”

“... and disruption in London have recently included the leading American scholar and critic of Israel Richard Falk, and discouragement to university authorities which do not want to act as censors but worry that the IHRA definition requires them to do so. When a replica of Israel’s separation wall was erected in the ...”

“... happiness in later life hard won. Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst was born in Manchester in 1882 to Richard Pankhurst, a radical barrister, and Emmeline Goulden, his stylish, much younger wife. A second child, she would always claim that her pretty elder sister, Christabel, got the lion’s share of attention – though, amusingly, the third ...”

“... with walls and hedges and fences. ‘Cottage Garden’, painted in 1939, in fact shows a wall with a garden behind it, while ‘Landscape in North Wales’ (1938) is dominated by the wooden fence in the foreground. Each of the ‘Gardens in the Pound, Cookham’ (1936) is the realisation of its owner’s private fancy, and each is scrupulously ...”

“... debt, friendship, family and inheritance. Starting from the breakdown of medieval landholding in Richard II and Henry IV, Maus ends, after two fine chapters on The Merchant of Venice, with an account of the ‘vagabond kings’ of Henry VI Part II and King Lear. The transition from feudalism to capitalism, from Richard II ...”

“... to that king of the métier Leo Castelli, he was ‘a superb dealer’; among leading artists, Richard Hamilton says that ‘Robert’s was the best gallery I knew in London,’ Ellsworth Kelly that ‘he was a very courageous and flamboyant dealer,’ Claes Oldenburg that ‘Robert really had an eye for draughtsmanship. Very few dealers have.’ He also ...”

“... of expression might – only might – cease to be perceived as a menace to national security. As Richard Sakwa’s book suggests, Putin has a choice of two directions. One is simply to ‘reconcentrate state power’. The other is to ‘reconstitute’ that power in a new form by imposing the rule of law. Putin talks a lot about ‘the dictatorship of ...”