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“... Who was Max Perutz? There are plenty of good answers. He was an X-ray crystallographer, someone who uses X-rays as a tool to discover the three-dimensional structure of molecules. He was an accomplished skier and climber, with a sideline research interest in glaciology. He was a scientific manager, who founded and presided over Cambridge’s spectacularly successful Laboratory of Molecular Biology ...”

“... of the naughty bits) and chose as their appointed biographer a 24-year-old American, Gordon Ray, who had just finished a doctorate on ‘Thackeray and France’. It was an eccentric choice: they could have had their pick of British biographers. But they wanted someone as remote from London’s gossip circuits as possible. ...”

“... a certain magnetism, it was true, but he looked nothing like the ‘handsome animal’ in the Man Ray photographs Gilot had seen in Cahiers d’art: ‘dark hair, bright flashing eyes, very squarely built’. Picasso came over to Gilot’s table, where she was dining with her friend Geneviève Aliquot and the actor Alain Cuny, bringing a bowl of ...”

“... at the scene, he alludes to it in a few paintings. In The Musings of the Solitary Walker (1926), a man in a bowler hat, a recurrent avatar of the artist, stands by a twilit river, his back turned to a female corpse floating horizontally across the canvas. ‘I don’t believe in psychology,’ Magritte remarked much later, no doubt to forestall facile ...”

“... life as they were listed in the popular counting chant: ‘tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, plough-boy, thief’ (the beggarman didn’t feature in this version). He finds the frequent appearance in Brandt’s pictures of figures in uniform – servants, policemen, nurses, waitresses – deeply ...”

“... rustic kind, but removed to the formality of a criminal courtroom he was an affront. What sort of man still needed to speak in that obscure and backward idiom halfway through the 20th century, in a country that prided itself on its vigilant and inclusive education system? The answer is just the sort of peasant patriarch, the Old ...”

“... which included a veiled attack on her father. She met Hemingway, Pound, Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Man Ray, Brancusi. She and Thelma slotted in neatly with the American expats Stein called the ‘Lost Generation’. Thelma was lost and losing it more and more. Her life with Barnes (or Robin Vote’s life with Nora Flood), as described in ...”

“... the new novel’s protagonist is less interested in social justice than in his own expedience. Ray Carney owns a furniture store on 125th Street in Harlem, has a college degree and, at the age of 29, aspires more than anything to move his family to a better neighbourhood. It’s a slippery climb up into the higher echelons of Harlem’s business elite, not ...”

“... be dissected with dignity. The ancestors of the figures in modern textbooks and encyclopedias, the man and woman in Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, manage it by gesturing eloquently as they are unpacked tripe by tripe. Their classical attitudes clearly label them as art. Francis Bacon turned his back on art when he used a book about positioning ...”

“... and she wanted to know why it was dry. I was miles away. I said I didn’t know. Aeroplane Glue Mr Ray stood behind me in History, waiting for me to make a slip. I had to write out the Kings and Queens of England, in reverse order, with dates. I put, ‘William I, 1087-1066’. I could smell the aeroplane glue on his fingers as he took hold of my ear. I stood ...”

“... achievements of classical civilisation than those of modern physics. Bertrand Russell, a Cambridge man and a mathematician who disparaged the effects of a classical education, could enthusiastically campaign for ‘scientific method in philosophy’, and Rudolf Carnap, writing in a self-consciously Russellian vein, claim that ‘the new type of philosophy has ...”

“... of life itself. In Rome, Ed Coleman makes an unsuccessful attempt to murder his son-in-law, Ray Garrett, a failed painter and gallery-owner in his late twenties, whom he blames for the recent suicide of his only child, Peggy, Ray’s wife. Rather than flee, Ray follows Ed to ...”

“... can a novelist compete with HBO? A television show can spend a hundred hours on the study of one man, his family, his colleagues, his psychiatrist, with space for digression and nuance: ‘The Sopranos isn’t Shakespeare, but it is Balzac,’ said Leon Wieseltier. Box sets of DVDs ape the look of a book with their pages of discs, and are designed to fit on ...”

“... few months after seeing Viridiana for the first time, I was in Spain, and met a charming man, a doctor, who claimed to know Buñuel intimately, and to have helped him recruit the beggars for that film. I can’t remember whether I believed him or not. Probably I did. Buñuel for me was as distant as Cervantes or Saint Teresa, and I didn’t even know ...”

“... by the presence of Stein’s image, by the sternly hieratic presence in portraits by Cecil Beaton, Man Ray and Carl Van Vechten. There were the biographers who were indifferent to her writing but interested in her celebrity, or her relationship with Toklas, or both. There were the researchers who loved her writing and sought to decode it, and who ...”