“... imperious. An art critic’s eyes. Rakish eyes. Pharmacopoeia eyes. His face is mask-like, giving little or nothing away. Bored, cigar-smoking, distrait. He could be lost in reverie, or just bored to tears. Charles Baudelaire might be one of the first great poseurs of our time – a not inconsiderable legacy. As with similar images of Baudelaire by Nadar and ...”

“... the multiversity, said Kerr, is unloved. There are no pious founders, no portraits in hall, little campus lore or tales of unworldly professors. The very mention of the neologism instantly conjures up the hateful association ‘bureaucracy’. No one can love the multiversity even with its satellite ‘colleges of letters and science’ as Americans ...”

“... not otherwise have read. The undergraduates in those days were 90 per cent American and knew very little about Europe. To help them, I found it useful to make constant comparisons between the US, the UK, France and Germany. I myself took graduate courses on the Soviet Union, Asia, the US and Western Europe. Finally, the format of the Southeast Asia programme ...”

“... adduces a whole range of commemorative practices that others simply ignore and which clearly have little if anything to do with Modernism. Germans, for example, could buy books that described how to make crosses and other signs of mourning from nails. A whole range of memorials, from little cast-iron statues of Hindenburg ...”

“... chapter of Woman: An Intimate Geography is devoted to a spirited defence of the aggression of little girls (a resolute cheerfulness, or ‘chirpy wellness’, to use Angier’s own expression, pervades the book): ‘the hyena girls, the leopard girls, the coyote and the crow girls ... the living, seething, aggressive girls who are the only girls I have ...”

“... but not all there: a man of hollow promises, fundamentally unreliable. Sometimes he seemed to be little more than a lazy impersonator of his own cherished self-image – airy, cunning, one of life’s happy drifters. He ended up in the penitentiary, following a poor attempt at forgery. If he’d only been a tiny bit smarter, he might have made one hell of a ...”

“... of 1991. (Some of these women serve on more than one board, which makes the statistics look a little brighter than they actually are.) There was really no need for the scare movie Baby Boom, which showed a bright career woman giving up her unnatural, highly paid working life in the boardroom, brought to her senses by having to take charge of a baby. The ...”

“... are recognisable. Let’s begin by crashing the shop talk of the cluster of film pioneers – Allan Dwan, Lillian Gish, King Vidor, Hoot Gibson, Edith Head – who remember Hollywood as ‘a virtual wilderness’, when Sunset Boulevard was unpaved and pictures were called ‘galloping tintypes’. In those carefree early years, Hollywood was an Eden of ...”

“... ever failed to get him to do so.’ Rider Haggard, in turn, obviously used Selous as a basis for Allan Quatermain in King Solomon’s Mines (1885). Like Selous, ‘Quatermain hunts trouserless and fortifies himself with cold tea.’ Then ‘life imitated art once again.’ Selous, in successive books, ‘sounded more and more like Ouatermain’. He became a ...”

“... his 43rd birthday, 29 January 1948 (though it is not documented until 1952), this thin canvas, a little over two feet tall, is a single field of dark cadmium red divided by a vertical stripe of one-inch tape painted over with orange cadmium red – the first full appearance of his famous ‘zip’ (though the term wasn’t used until the ...”

“... but the aperture for the jack was ominously soft and sticky with rust. The long-suffering little car received the vertical spear in its chassis, and stayed stoically earthbound. Now I have to say that I am already on very bad terms with the inanimate world. Even when making a cup of coffee or changing a light bulb (or a fuse!), I think – what is it ...”

“... frame houses stuck like oyster shells on a hill of rock, and below us, the sea lapped the raw little match-stick mazes of a weir, where the fish for bait were trapped. Six years later, Bishop sent Lowell a postcard from the Art Institute of Chicago of Winslow Homer’s Marblehead – an image of two people in conversation on a coastal rock. ‘Out of all ...”

“... in Greenwich Village, and through one of the actresses there met and began taking classes with Allan Miller, a disciple of Lee Strasberg. She auditioned for Strasberg’s Actors Studio aged sixteen, and though she didn’t get in they encouraged her to try again later; piqued, she never did. When she left school in January 1960, she had her first role ...”

“... no more’.The phrase has had several lives. It first appeared in a song by the Edinburgh poet Allan Ramsay published in 1724:Farewell to Lochaber, farewell to my JeanWhere heartsome wi’ her I ha’e many days beenFor Lochaber no more, Lochaber no moreWe’ll maybe return to Lochaber no more.The words were matched to an old melody, possibly ...”

“... volumes, have tended to leave the peninsula well alone. Out there, reality was always in need of a little cosmetic enhancement. Design buffs on the Millennium Experience payroll see the sorry isthmus with its muddy horizons, its earth-movers and excavators, its razor-wire fences and surveillance cameras, as an Arcadian grotto. They have no problem with ...”