“... on this stage from time to time are Thomas Hardy, visited more than once in Dorchester: Tea at Max Gate. Lady Stacie there, a descendant of R.B. Sheridan – and a fashionable lady, formerly a great beauty. She gushed to T.H. about his novels at the tea-table. He shut her up by saying ‘I am not interested in my novels. I haven’t written one for more ...”

“... prose is every bit as urgent as his poetry – it crackles like his thistles under a frosty blue-black pressure. In this type of criticism, the reading process becomes more than analogous to the act of writing: reading fuses with writing because it empathises in a dramatic manner with the critic’s struggle to express ideas, a struggle that resembles an ...”

“... went foraging for African and Native American art in the city’s antique shops with Breton, Max Ernst and Duchamp. After the war, the local variants of phenomenology and Marxism became international cults. Structuralism, which understood culture according to a linguistic model, as a system of differences and oppositions (...”

“... transalpine cabinets, colleges and salons, to Voltaire and to the Lunar Men of Birmingham and the Black Country, bore fruit. He became a celebrated physics professor at the prestigious, if troubled, Pavia University, and its rector from 1785. Evidently, these journeys and triumphs were accompanied by more fun-loving enterprises. With a mix of precision and ...”

“... not Sex and the City … That’s four gay men sitting around talking.’ Meanwhile Issa Rae, the Black creator of HBO’s Insecure (2016-21), defended Dunham against allegations of ‘hipster racism’: ‘There could be more diversity, but I think that’s the fault of [HBO], rather than Lena’s.’It’s never easy to distinguish between drama that breaks ...”

“... of that influence is not always obvious and the biographer is always liable to exaggerate it. Max Jacob, Apollinaire, the Steins – such figures live in this biography not only as very strange, strong personalities but by virtue of their beliefs and talents which Richardson vividly summarises. Jacob was Picasso’s first laureate. These two short men ...”

“... reaction against the Picturesque was one motivating factor for the Modernist garden movement. Black and white photographs enhanced the linearity of the designs and the autochrome – a technique as short-lived as the gardens them selves – threw unifying veils of pointillist colour over decorative schemes. This process set the garden and its image into ...”

“... unknown even to his students. Wilson mentions that Rutherford’s failures sometimes drove him to black despair. His 1909 model of the atom failed to explain why the electrons do not fall into the nucleus to neutralise its charge. Niels Bohr took up this problem. He combined Rutherford’s model with Planck’s quantum theory by postulating that, for reasons ...”

“... building blocks of quantum theory, that uncommonsensical account of subatomic reality devised by Max Planck at the turn of the 20th century. The theory replaced certainty with probability, a thing that Einstein could never bring himself to accept. One of the ironies of the Bergson-Einstein affair, as Canales notes, is that the world according to quantum ...”

“... by the Bolshevik and Chinese communist revolutions; and ‘pandemics’ principally by the Black Death of the 14th century. ‘State failure’ – Scheidel sometimes calls it ‘systems collapse’ – is somewhat more sketchily represented by the sudden and still mysterious disappearance in the 11th century bce of the palatial Mycenaean kingdoms of ...”

“... of the nativist gang (adorned and equipped, like their adversaries, in Braveheart meets Mad Max style), the Rabbits are outlawed and Priest’s young son, Amsterdam Vallon (soon to be Leonardo DiCaprio), is bundled off to a reformatory. In 1862, during the Civil War, the grown-up Vallon returns to the unchanged frontier town of Five Points, still run ...”

“... White to White features an aggressively encrusted pale rectangle with a second rectangle – black, white and brown – in its top left corner. Dated 1953, fairly early for such deliberately coarse abstraction, the painting landed in the collection of the famously plain-spoken art critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg never published on the relatively ...”

“... Nixon’s pancake make-up was also yielding to stress: there was, he recorded, ‘a large glob of Max Factor hanging from a hair in the middle of the groove at the end of his nose’. Graver problems beset Mao, who was waiting some distance away in his house in the walled Zhongnanhai compound, impatient for news of Nixon’s arrival. Dressed in a new suit and ...”

“... to advice that asserted the centrality of line. His Danish father made a living producing black and white illustrations for a German magazine (Sickert’s mother was English, and the family moved to England from Munich in 1868, when Sickert was eight). He already shared Degas’s admiration for Charles Keene, an illustrator for Punch whom he later ...”

“... France had moved on, but Modiano, the son of a Jewish businessman who had made his living on the black market during the Occupation and a Flemish actress who worked in the Nazi film industry, could not. He was so consumed by the history of Occupied Paris, the city where his parents had met, that he felt as if he had memories of it, although he was born in ...”