“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... talks about his boyhood in France in the 1930s: ‘The return to savagery – to the Minotaur, for Max Ernst, to Picasso’s paganism – I still see these today as the atrocious forces unleashed on society during that era … my generation still sees Guernica falling on painting … the way the Nazi planes bombarded the town.’ Latour, slightly ...”

“... Carrington’s mother sent her a copy of Herbert Read’s Surrealism. The picture on the cover was Max Ernst’s Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, which shows three female figures: one lying on the ground, fainted or dead; the second fleeing towards the left of the frame; the third slumped in the arms of a male figure. ‘I thought, ah, this is ...”

“... of Klava reminded me of Einstein’s heartless references to his wife in his correspondence with Max Born. After Klava’s death he gave all the money he had won from various prizes – 139,000 roubles – to charity, without a thought that his children might need it, like Leo Tolstoy, who made over the royalties from his books to charity and left his family ...”

“... meant making an accommodation with a just as fervently anti-communist Federal Republic. He and Max Horkheimer had already censored themselves in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), using carefully coded terms for class struggle and capitalism; subsequently Adorno took his name off the (excellent) book he had written with Eisler on cinema music, Composing ...”

“... with Hardy, his second wife, Florence, and the prince sitting awkwardly in the garden at Max Gate, on wicker seats. Florence looks almost asthmatically taut with terror, but Hardy, the only one not looking at the camera, is serenely sunk in himself. The prince confessed that he had not read a word by his host. But what could that matter, really, to ...”