“... supposed geniuses seem like dullards. How could Einstein not immediately grasp the reality of black holes, which I understand so well? It’s a wonder he could hold down that job in the patent office when he doesn’t even know about wormholes. If these really are stories rather than essays, Labatut needs to make his people come alive, as Guy Davenport ...”

“... to burnish his culture wars résumé. Also disgraceful was the disenfranchisement of Florida’s black electorate on his watch. Florida election officials, ostensibly looking to prevent felons from casting ballots, worked from lists riddled with errors and mistaken entries, with the result that more than 12,000 qualified ...”

“... a triptych. Along with Bosch, Koerner takes up two other artists attuned to dangerous moments: Max Beckmann, a German painter, damaged psychologically in the First World War, who was a near contemporary of Schmitt and Jünger; and William Kentridge, a white South African shaped by anti-apartheid struggles, and Koerner’s near contemporary. The Bosch ...”

“... them to the chair’. Clark noted that Beardsley’s work showed Munch ‘how simplified areas of black and white can work on the emotions’ and that Picasso, who had seen Beardsley’s prints in the Barcelona art journal Joventut, ‘made good use of Beardsley’s pure outlines’. I half-expected him to go on and make the obvious connection with ...”

“... were, they ran the risk of going too far in the other direction. ‘As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure,’ Wald argued, ‘and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note.’ His book came close to suggesting Johnson wasn’t much ...”

“... task force, or cast and crew – to work together to get the job done.The example offered is Black Hawk Down (2001), a blockbuster based on a book by Mark Bowden about the near disastrous military operation that culminated in the hasty retreat of US forces from the centre of Mogadishu. Thomson tells us that he has felt compelled to watch the movie over ...”

“... hardly know what may happen in real life and fear it accordingly. On the night of the New York black-out in 1965 someone I know was with his analyst. As the lights went out the analyst – not the patient – jumped out of his chair and shouted: ‘They’re coming to get me.’ Psychoanalysts have had good reasons for considering themselves ...”

“... A photograph taken that morning shows Phillips sitting in a canoe, speaking to a local man in a black cap and camouflage cargo trousers who is holding a child in a green shirt. Phillips is recording the conversation on his phone. Minutes later some of the villagers watched as he and Pereira cast off in a narrow aluminium boat with a 40-horsepower ...”

“... reader’s first glimpse of him, Chéri is dancing in front of the rose-coloured curtains, ‘all black, like a graceful devil’, the pink light making a pink spark play on his teeth and eyes. He’s grabbed the pearls and is parading in front of the full-length mirror, ‘a very beautiful, very young man, neither tall nor short, his hair tinged with blue ...”

“... clawing back of control by central government. First the new methods were mocked. The ‘Black Papers’ published in Critical Quarterly between 1969 and 1977 decried the ‘levelling down … towards a uniform mediocrity’ produced by comprehensive education. The tabloids gave lurid descriptions of the radical approaches taken in schools such as ...”

“... place at the very time when the Italian state lost its power to control law and order. Red and black terrorism of the 1970s shook the credibility of the Police, and an almost uninterrupted string of scandals at every level of government and civic life reduced the will and reliability of bureaucracy. The state lost that ‘monopoly of violence’ which ...”

“... experts are right – goes Montaigne. To the bonfire with William Hazlitt, closely followed by Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve and John Aubrey. A brusque kiss-off to Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, La Bruyère and the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, perhaps the ...”

“... had become a pervasive cultural mood, in concord with many of the preoccupations of the age. For Max Nordau, in Degeneration (1892), the Wagner cult was ‘the most widespread, and therefore the most significant, of all present-day aberrations’. Not everyone was seduced: Rimbaud was indifferent; Tolstoy denounced the Ring cycle as ‘counterfeit art’; a ...”

“... succès d’estime the Smart Set with ‘louse magazines’ such as Parisienne, Saucy Stories and Black Mask. Die neue linie, featuring work by Bauhaus designers such as László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Irmgard Sörensen-Popitz, was a revamp of the mass market German women’s magazine Frauen-Mode and a probable influence on Vanity Fair’s designer ...”

“... rehearsal and performance of experimental music.’ Among those impressed by Cage in Chicago was Max Ernst, who arranged for his wife, Peggy Guggenheim, to celebrate the opening of her new gallery in New York with a concert of Cage’s percussion music. So John and Xenia upped sticks yet again, arriving in the city in the spring of 1942 with 25 cents between ...”