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“... supply and sold them to people who had no choice but to buy. He learnt how to sue before the other man sued him, and how to move on before the questions turned awkward. His ambiguous relationship with his native country is shown by his adoption of US citizenship, but this did not prevent him leaving most of his priceless collection of antiquities ‘to the ...”

“... the traces of innumerable mugs of tea, was the manager, Mr Hoskyns: a harassed, irascible little man who had evidently suffered a stroke or some kind of palsy, since the right-hand side of his face was paralysed and the corner of his mouth was held up by a little gold hook and chain suspended from his spectacles. Out of the other corner of his mouth he asked ...”

“... forgivingly) at the moral youthfulness that lands Dorothea in a marriage to an older man whose scholarly seriousness is uncompromised by wit or sexual charm; but Woolf seems to have pitied Dorothea for hanging on to some of the same earnestness in her second marriage, ‘seeking wisdom and finding one scarcely knows what’. Maturity may remain ...”

“... finished. When Mies drew her attention to the excellence of his chief draftsman, she sat in the man’s office for hours practising mechanical drawing after persuading him to give her lessons. ‘I took my drawing board and T-square with me when I travelled, even to Paris,’ she writes.Lambert’s account is so engaging not only because it is the story of ...”

“... appearance today is in keeping with a longer history of manipulation. After visiting the studio, Man Ray reported that he was ‘more impressed than in any cathedral. I was overwhelmed by its whiteness and lightness … [It] was like entering another world.’ Brancusi did everything he could to maintain this atmosphere, dressing all in white, sporting ...”

“... more to place than to family. ‘I feel as if I were going to get married – to the right man at last,’ she joked to a friend in anticipation of the move to Hyères in 1922. Though her marriage endured for 28 years, she and Teddy seem to have had scarcely anything in common apart from a zest for travel, a love of motor cars and a fondness for little ...”

“... Ray Strachey​ is remembered, if at all, for The Cause, her history of the women’s movement, published in 1928. But reading that book – which is dedicated to Strachey’s friend and mentor Millicent Garrett Fawcett – you wouldn’t know that its writer played a major role in the events described at the end, when an ‘almost religious fervour … sent young ladies to street corners to demand the vote’, and to pledge ‘their whole lives to the Cause ...”

“... to shell-shocked soldiers during the First World War, and a recurring trope in his writing is a ‘man cut in two by the window’, the very figure of a divided subject. Max Ernst, the most traumatophilic of Surrealists, read Freud in the original German and related the layering of his early collages to the working over of primal fantasies and other traumatic ...”

“... newly arrived in the British Museum. What he saw there made him exclaim that he was the first man to read these words for two thousand years. Then he started rushing around the room, removing his clothes. Shortly afterwards, he read a paper about his discoveries before the Society of Biblical Archaeology. Gladstone was in the audience – the only ...”

“... a nuclear war and began the process of aggressively selling the virtues of a nuclear bomb-pumped X-ray laser then in the very early research stages at Livermore. On the evening of 23 March 1983, Reagan startled the world by announcing the Star Wars programme and Teller was in the White House audience, having been specially summoned there by the President. The ...”

“... funny comedy of arrested development: a coming-of-age novel in which the main character is 33. Ray Morris is a shallow, infantile narcissist reluctantly facing the terrors of adulthood, in the form of his general lack of prospects, and the well-advanced pregnancy of his wife, Garthene, an intensive care nurse. (‘It is terrific to have a partner with the ...”

“... even sound like a book I’d like. It’s the story of Martin Luther King’s murderer, James Earl Ray, mostly on the run in 1968, and mostly for a couple of weeks in Lisbon, spliced with reflection on a crisis (he of course doesn’t use such a word) in Muñoz Molina’s early life twenty years later, when his second child was born and he was trying to find ...”

“... partner worthy of her, and transplants it to a utopian matriarchal community in Botswana. For a man to recast Pride and Prejudice as a modern, feminist love affair, and then to set it in Africa, is a bold move, and neither the book’s reworking of the conventions of first-person narrative nor its relentlessly artificial language seem to owe anything to ...”

“... warmed to him. His eccentricity became a disguise, an armour of winking and raillerie concealing a man nobody knew.His upbringing didn’t dispose him to fit in. He was born in May 1866 in Honfleur, to a French father and an English mother who insisted that he was baptised into the Anglican Church. This turned out to be a false start. His father, Alfred, when ...”