“... Británica played a conspicuous part in several of Bolívar’s battles; it was a Captain George Brown who raised the patriot standard over Spanish lines after Sucre’s victory at Ayacucho in December 1824, the battle that clinched independence. Bolívar liked his British officers: a Union Jack catches the eye in the ...”

“... help to illustrate, the British Empire imposed repressive governance but also bred the warriors (brown, black and white) who would overthrow it. By forcing million-strong population movements, the empire spread diseases, but also developed the medical technology to treat them. Game reserves and national parks were established to protect nature, but were ...”

“... not in an art gallery but at the Arsenal cinema. Goldin reveres Visconti, Antonioni, Cassavetes, Jack Smith. Her images – I’m thinking of a self-portrait at a window, in which she has a curl at the nape of her neck and scratches on her exposed back – form part of an autobiographical narrative, one that reveals in order to keep battling against denial ...”

“... differ, some of them wildly, but it seems to have been one track in particular, ‘Jack U Off’, that triggered most of the derision and homophobic barracking.)1 The rest of the band were game to push on, but Prince fled home to Minneapolis in a funk. If he was angry, it was perhaps most of all with himself: at some level he must have ...”

“... thrown off the project, which was eventually built to a design by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Whatever its programmatic ‘complexity and contradiction’, as Venturi would put it, the Sainsbury Wing ‘looked’ to the casual eye like just another part of Trafalgar Square, all Corinthian columns and Portland stone. ABK never recovered, and neither ...”

“... never thought “Ronald” was rugged enough for a young red-blooded American boy.’ His father, Jack, was a retail salesman in various lines, a hopeless drunk who bounced from one job to another, dragging his family with him from town to town; his mother, Nelle, took in sewing and prayed for her husband’s sobriety with a prairie Protestant church called ...”

“... The ‘great ship’ was the British Empire; the words are those of the imperial historian Jack Gallagher. Noel Annan believed that the ‘peaceful divestment of the empire’ was ‘the most successful political achievement of Our Age’. The main actors on the British side all came out of it pretty chuffed, too. They must have been encouraged in this ...”

“... cover his own basic dullness. He remembered the visits Wilde made to his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown: Mr Wilde was a quiet individual who came every Saturday, for years, to tea … Wilde would sit in a high-backed armchair, stretching out one hand a little towards the blaze of the wood fire on the hearth and talking of the dullest possible things to Ford ...”

“... prose.) If everybody loved Penman on Paul Schrader, on James Garner, scraping the formaldehyde off Jack Nicholson, then the Roeg improvisation hit the wall. The advantage of deadline delivery in the old punk days was that pieces went straight into print. That’s what, looking at this collection, this fat blue chunk of his life, Penman missed. The tarted-up ...”

“... films we have experienced. And it’s not where we were when we heard about the assassination of Jack Kennedy, but what we were watching: television. Home alone, or straining the neck to look at a wall-mounted set in a half-empty restaurant, we were in thrall to waveringly remote prints of reality. Meanwhile, on the same afternoon, the nominated ...”

“... churning up dust. In vast, windowless sheds specialising in Logistics. In geometric stacks of red, brown and blue containers: HAMBURG SÜD, HANJIN, MOL. Like a monumental Paul Klee hammered out in steel. In Thatcher’s day it seemed a ground-level manifestation of what I took to be her vision of enterprise: deranged scams, small businesses wiped out. And the ...”

“... War nostalgia. Item: the Weekend Guardian’s spring fashion issue, with Alexa Chung, the nut-brown-haired television presenter, posed to look like a figure from 1940s propaganda posters – Women of Britain, Go to the Shops. Item: those creepy Home Office billboards – ‘You Have The Right NOT To Remain Silent’ – copied from that ubiquitous ‘Keep ...”

“... was a fishmonger. In the early 1920s he had had an offer from a friend in the film industry, Jack Hyams, to become a partner. Had he accepted he’d have owned a large share in Gaumont-British, but he hadn’t been prepared to take the risk of moving into unknown territory. Within his familiar trade he had done reasonably well in a modest way, owning two ...”

“... life, growth and decay, and particularly of wood and lumber and mulch, of red and green and brown leaves. Of ‘a house eats up the wood that made it,’ of ‘We live, two trees,’ of ‘the leaves light up, still green, this afternoon,/and burn to frittered reds,’ of ‘the mind, which is also flesh’, of the scriptural ‘all flesh is grass, and ...”

“... the cabinet and outside it ready to help the prime minister along. And so much nodding, and from Jack Straw in particular, still nodding on the front bench today like a dog in the back window of a Fiesta. The newspapers fall for Butler’s smooth speaking even when they know how specious it is. One of his predecessors as master of University College, Oxford ...”