“... thanks to the only avant-garde journal of the time, Angry Penguins. Angry Penguins was edited by Max Harris, a student at Adelaide University, and John Reed, who was 10 years Harris’s senior and lived just outside Melbourne. Independently wealthy, Reed was committed to sponsoring any form of artistic originality that caught his eye; on meeting the ...”

“... still in the Habsburg Empire. As a young man publishing his first poems, he sat in cafés with Max Brod, Franz Kafka, Egon Erwin Kisch, Milena Jesenská and Willy Haas. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War, ending up in Vienna, where he graduated to the intellectual hothouse of the Café Central and, in 1915, was introduced to Alma ...”

“... Kawakami Otojiro. He had just completed a tour of Europe, where he had hoodwinked the critics – Max Beer-bohm among them – into believing that his renderings of plays like The Warrior and the Geisha (his wife played the geisha) were Kabuki masterpieces. Back in Tokyo, Kawakami’s Hamlet took the stage riding a bicycle. This, the Kabuki scholar Earle ...”

“... on the fuss about gay marriage, and ‘Christmas’, which details the casual ripping-off of a black roofer by his colleagues and was originally published as an autobiographical essay, these stories make up the most explicitly political section of the book, which is organised under rubrics drawn from an imaginary ‘Taskbook for the New Nation’. The ...”

“... is needed. The favourite devices they fall back on seem to be amnesia, cosmetic surgery, and ‘black science’, involving cloning, brainwashing, mind-theft, memory-abuse and personality-swapping. The fruitfulness of these made-over traditional themes and motifs can be seen in her analysis of Random Harvest (1942), Duplicates (1992), and Total Recall ...”

“... New England in 1780, which shows the three stages of woman, with a cradle, a bed and a coffin (a black maid holds the baby). Emin is a chronicler of women’s rites of passage, and for all the haunting presence/absence of men in her work, she conveys truly passionate attachments to women. In that first blanket, Hotel International (the name of her father’s ...”

“... Rohde’s Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks (1894) and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). What these works had in common was their attempt to analyse religion as a social process. They presented religious practice as continuous with other forms of normative social activity, liable ...”

“... years before she exhibited Ma Gouvernante at her first solo show, Oppenheim began an affair with Max Ernst. She was 20, studying art in Paris; he was 44. His wife, the painter Marie-Berthe Aurenche, was 29. The shoes were Aurenche’s, a second-hand gift from Ernst to Oppenheim, who bound and plated them. After the exhibition ended, she sent the piece to the ...”

“... then of herself as an angel on the outside but a fiend within, and later spoke of her fits of black depression – confirmed by others – that included a ‘swollen awkward feeling’ dating from childhood. She and her fertility had survived, but her psyche was clearly shaken, and her personality took its definitive shape. Her brother reports that ...”

“... More did mean worse – although not quite in the way Kingsley Amis feared. He and his Black Paper colleagues misjudged what would happen to ‘standards’ after the expansionist Robbins Report. The British university product – the education of undergraduates and scholarly research – has never been better than it now is, nor its international reputation higher ...”

“... as an engineer at a laboratory on Long Island. To his adult son Semyon would say: ‘I burn with a black envy towards you. I should have been an artist as well.’ For all his gifts as a satirist, Shteyngart is at his best in parsing the nuances of familial interaction and sifting through the emotional wreckage beneath. Dispatches from more recent family ...”

“... that focused efforts such as Rhodes Must Fall have had a rallying effect, while the evolution of Black Lives Matter would be unthinkable without the forms of ‘acclaim’ and ‘complaint’ that social media is so effective at propagating. The reason racism is being discussed by broadcasters, politicians and historic institutions as never before is largely ...”

“... of these ironies when I visited the Tate Modern exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which featured the work of black American artists from the 1960s and 1970s, when intelligence agencies (and agents provocateurs) were spearheading a government crackdown on ...”

“... on a scholarship to study painting. Soon afterwards, spotted at a New Year’s Eve party wearing black stockings, she was the talk of Carshalton. ‘Well, no one wore black stockings,’ Penrose remembers, ‘so it was “Ahhh”.’Wimbledon, however, was not exciting. The painting department was stuck in a prewar ...”

“... course, the number five: it is the arrangement of points, or objects, in the same pattern as the black or white squares of a chessboard, or the ‘five’ of a pack of cards. Logically, this might imply that Constance, as the third element, has a central part to play, being the focal point through which all the remainder intercommunicate. However this may ...”