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“... How​ would a child know that Jesus was a special kind of adult? In early modern depictions of Christ blessing little children, it’s conventional for even the smallest babies to be aware that there’s something different about this man, their faces turned trustfully towards his as they clutch apples or dolls or their parents’ hands. Nicolaes Maes’s version of the theme in Christ Blessing the Children (1652-53), one of the earliest pieces in the National Gallery’s retrospective (currently closed, but to be extended), displaces Jesus from his traditional spot at the centre of the composition to foreground the little girl he blesses ...”

“... In​ 1660, a Commonwealth warship called HMS Naseby sailed to the Dutch Republic to bring the new king-in-waiting home to England. During its journey the ship was renamed the Royal Charles in honour of the Restoration, but her figurehead – a vast carving of Cromwell on horseback, wearing laurels and ‘trampling six nations under foot’, as John Evelyn put it – remained in place ...”

“... Light​ falls on the side of a woman’s upturned face, travels over her right shoulder and forearm and then down to her thigh and knee. The limbs are dense and opaque, the solid curve of the upper arm mirroring the heavy bent leg with its bluish shadows of muscle. The flesh is massive but yielding: the woman’s left breast bulges and puckers like real tissue as she grasps it between the fingers of one hand ...”

“... An​ Instagram post is a small square picture, roughly seven centimetres by seven on an average phone screen. If covered in text it has space for about 25 lines of poetry in a font size you can read without squinting. This is an Instagram poem by Rupi Kaur:if you are not enough for yourselfyou will never be enoughfor someone elseKaur is so famous that parodies of her verse trend on Twitter: ‘i understand/why guacamole is/extra/it is because/you/were never/enough – rupi kaur ...”

“... If you were​ to make a film of Gu Byeong-mo’s The Old Woman with the Knife, you’d need a lot of extras. In the novel’s public spaces, no one does anything remotely out of the ordinary without bystanders gathering, staring or pretending not to stare. An old man tips over a rubbish cart in the middle of the road and is given a ‘pointed look’ by one onlooker, while another ‘chews gum loudly’, waiting for the pavement to be cleared; groups of pedestrians ‘frown as they stomp over flattened boxes ...”

“... Novelists​ like to snoop inside their characters’ underwear drawers. In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926), Laura, the heroine, finds her sister-in-law Caroline difficult to read, except in one telling aspect:Once only did she speak her spiritual mind to Laura. Laura was nursing her when she had influenza; Caroline wished to put on a clean nightdress, and Laura, opening the third drawer of the large mahogany wardrobe, had commented upon the beautiful orderliness with which Caroline’s body linen was arranged therein ...”

“... In​ Rivka Galchen’s new novel, a man who might be a pedlar tells a story of a land where people have everything they could possibly want to eat, ‘brandy, bread, dumplings, cream, honey, almonds, chicken, radishes’, but no salt. ‘When mealtime came,’ the maybe-pedlar explains, ‘the parents would abuse one another, or sometimes hit the children, until someone provided the tears ...”

“... Bronzino’s portrait of Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara (c.1560), shows a teenage girl you can read in two ways. In one light, the jewels encircling her head and neck look weighty, unpleasant; her hair is coiffed in tight, tiny curls that seem to pull at her skin; the high ruff she wears must scratch and rub; she looks unsure, out of place, a small pale face swallowed up by a dark background, the shadow of a vein pulsing at her temple ...”

“... Every morning​ , between reciting the Hail Mary and beginning their lessons, the children at St Dallan’s Catholic primary school near Belfast do ‘The News’. News, in this community, might mean many things: that someone’s father, perennially out of work for ‘kicking with the wrong foot’, has managed to find a job; that the pop group Mud has gone to number one with ‘Oh Boy’; or, more likely, that there’s been a murder, a beating, a car bomb, a riot, a high-profile trial ...”

“... It’s opening night​ at the National Theatre. The radical writer and director Amma Bonsu, snubbed for decades by the cultural establishment for her uncompromising work (FGM: The Musical; Cunning Stunts), is about to astonish audiences with a new play. The Last Amazon of Dahomey has sold out before the run begins; it features 18th-century lesbian West African warriors, ‘thunderous armies of charging Amazons brandishing muskets and machetes/hollering and swelling towards the audience ...”

“... Eleanor Catton’s​ characters enjoy playing other people. Mira Bunting, the twenty-something founder of Birnam Wood, an activist gardening collective, maintains a ‘rotation’ of aliases for undercover purposes. To glean information about a property listing in the small town of Thorndike in New Zealand, she transforms – via a fake email account – into Mrs June Crowther, a plausible-sounding boomer, ‘68, retired, and profoundly deaf’, who hopes to invest her ‘modest nest egg’ in a low-maintenance holiday home ...”

“... At  Pizzeria  Vesuvio, somewhere in South London in 2003, the difference between being a chef and being a waitress isn’t just professional. Nia and Ava, who work front of house, are British and European, white or – in Nia’s case – white-looking; Shan, Guna and Rajan in the kitchen are Sri Lankan Tamils, refugees from the civil war working illegally while they wait for their asylum applications to be processed ...”

“... Tom Hargreaves​ , the anti-hero of Megan Nolan’s second novel, is young, bland-faced and good at ingratiating himself in places he doesn’t belong. A journalist for the Daily Herald, he reflexively imagines tabloid headlines: ‘NEIGHBOURS FROM HELL’; ‘DISCO INFERNO!’; ‘Uncle of Kid Killer was Peeping Tom As a Teen – To His Own Stepmum!’ Tom is a complicated hack: at times he has to play-act the sophistication his colleagues seem to possess naturally, and some mornings he has blaring intrusive thoughts in editorial meetings ...”

“... Nell,​ the narrator of Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren, can’t imagine real words coming out of her boyfriend’s mouth. ‘When I think about him talking, all he says is: Bloke, bloke bloke bloke. Blokey bloking bloke, bloke-bloke bloking.’ The boyfriend in question, Felim, a tall, taciturn farmer’s son, built like ‘a plastic model of what-goes-where’, turns out to have an interest in choking and taking non-consensual photographs of women ...”

“... The​ professions open to younger sons of the aristocracy and gentry at the beginning of the 19th century could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In Sense and Sensibility Edward Ferrars, who has chosen to do nothing for a living and regrets it, reels off four possibilities:I always preferred the church, as I still do. But that was not smart enough for my family ...”