“... to produce the works for the Jeff Koons Room inside, had kept to schedule with Puppy and no more greenery had been required since Saturday. For this reason a member of the autonomous Basque police, the Ertzaintza, checked the numberplate of the van – and found it to be false. When he asked for identification, he was shot in the back (and died the next ...”

“... girth, he commanded a room. On one occasion in Berkeley, wind in his sails, he ranted on stage for more than four hours before Duncan walked out and the staff turned off the lights. Apparently Creeley would begin by making a statement or observation on which he proceeded to riff, taking it through all sorts of transmogrifications, before landing neatly back ...”

“... a small fortune in the art of ‘lending existence to nothing’, as Edmund Burke defined poetry. Thomas Hardy gave her the blurb of a lifetime when he said that the two greatest things about the United States were the skyscrapers and Edna St Vincent Millay. Her poems are still in print, and her famous lines still recognisable: ‘Euclid alone has looked on ...”

“... that it’s time for her meeting with Bernard Stonestreet, an ad exec in ‘a Paul Smith suit, more specifically the 118 jacket and the 11T trouser’. Cayce, by contrast, wears a ‘museum-grade replica of a US MA-1 flying jacket . . . created by Japanese obsessives’. Afterwards there’s lunch, ‘the food California-inflected Vietnamese fusion with ...”

“... relations in the United States. Despite the twists and turns of official policy – from Thomas Jefferson’s efforts to assimilate Indians by teaching them to farm (even though they had been doing so for centuries), to Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal, Grant’s ‘peace policy’ and Roosevelt’s Indian New Deal – the fact is that whites from ...”

“... paintings (especially the Madonna della Sedia) and had been adopted in famous paintings by Thomas Lawrence and Ingres. Moreover, the style of Brown’s painting owes nothing to Botticelli. It does, however, owe something to the example of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini portrait, with its central convex mirror, which had been acquired by the National Gallery in ...”

“... inevitability, the second-rate quality of American government remains surprising and is all the more irritating for that reason. Who can accept that the richest of all nations should be governed by such unimpressive men? Who can understand how successive Presidents of the United States, supposedly the most powerful men in the world, should be uniformly ...”

“... a tale of battlefield heroism and deathbed stoicism that helped the myth of Sidney to become more powerful than the man had ever been. The funeral procession in London, arranged at the crippling expense of his father-in-law Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth, and preserved in the public imagination by ...”

“... Schumann turned to chamber music; and in 1843, to the oratorio, with a setting of sections from Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh, under the title of Das Paradies und die Peri. After this there was a hiatus, caused partly by a bout of severe depression, and partly by the emergence of a new style; and it was not until 1847 that Schumann managed to concentrate on ...”

“... people. He is one of those German authors who are a little in love with the English, more particularly a certain kind of young Englishman of the upper classes, with his good temper and considerateness, his easy good manners and what Thomas Mann called his ‘boyhaft’ good looks. This affection, rarely ...”

“... cultural activities in Catalonia, so that art, architecture and the Catalan language had become more powerful weapons in politics than resentment about Madrid’s handling of foreign or economic policy. The architects who worked on the new apartment blocks and public buildings in Barcelona between 1880 and 1910 began to play with a dual mandate, not merely ...”

“... English, in fact, that he will object that his mother is Australian.) He simply makes it a more interesting condition than others succeed in doing, or else he escapes its limitations altogether. So many of the ways one thinks of him are paradoxical. In an adaptation of his own phrase (from ‘Sugar Daddy’) he is a ‘passionate clown’. He is ...”

“... bought one three-thousandth of a week before the draw, which is about three and a half minutes. A more sophisticated calculation takes age into account, in which case a 75-year-old needs to buy a ticket 24 seconds before the lottery is drawn, but a 16-year-old could risk buying one an hour and ten minutes before. It is an amusing calculation, but as an ...”

“... Leaming, who attributes every quote. As it is, we must take Brady on trust, an act of faith made more uncomfortable by his habit of quelling controversy by starting sentences with ‘Actually ...’ But Brady’s larger canvas at least enables him to give even more weight – some two hundred pages – to Welles’s career ...”

“... consulting physician at the Royal Hospital for Diseases of the Chest. ‘I have not often derived more pleasure and instruction from a book,’ Stevenson wrote to him, confessing that he felt ‘but a wreck’ and was filled with anxieties, though he believed he had been right not to go to Davos, ‘to an air charged with germs’. Already the author of vivid ...”