“... An old photograph in a cheap frame hangs on a wall of the room where I work. It’s a picture, dating from 1946, of a house into which, at the time of its taking, I had not yet been born. The house is rather peculiar – a three-storied gabled affair with tiled roofs and round towers in two corners, each wearing a pointy tile hat ...”

“... exporting of equipment, technologies of torture and bad lieutenants. To take one instance, Richard Zuley, a specialist at Guantánamo, had become reassuringly ruthless while working for a Chicago police unit that for decades interrogated predominantly African-Americans at so-called black sites. It’s only now, with a white supremacist ensconced in the ...”

“... luxury glimpsed on West German television which encouraged Easterners to pull down the Berlin Wall. This was the secret hope at the heart of the Sunshine Policy: that, slowly and at first undetectably, it would infect the North Korean body politic with the virus of information, self-consciousness and, eventually, rebellion. The dungeon in which North ...”

“... for representing the world as it is. Reported detail is not just roughage but nourishment, and Richard Price’s Lazarus Man could have been written in honour of Wolfe’s prescriptions.Wolfe proposed journalism as a necessary ingredient of consequential fiction, repeating the prediction he made in 1973 in The New Journalism that the future of the novel ...”

“... him through university died, and a landscape painter because he could afford a pupilage with Richard Wilson, but not with a portrait painter. His work in the vein of his master was not a path to fame either in England or in Italy, where he travelled from 1777 to 1783. He sought the patronage of Sir William Hamilton, and failed to get it: ‘his recourse ...”

“... The royal quarters were ‘easily as big as the town of Haarlem and enclosed by a remarkable wall … [with] beautiful long galleries about as big as the Exchange at Amsterdam’. One of these galleries, resting on wooden pillars, was ‘decorated from top to bottom with cast copper’, depicting ‘deeds of war and battle scenes’. That the inheritor ...”

“... life of the mediatised book group: Oprah’s Book Club had just returned from a year’s break and Richard and Judy were about to launch a UK version. (It was also a good year for coffee: by 2003 there were 425 Starbucks branches in the UK, up from 50 in 1998.) Consumers across the Anglophone world faithfully bought books, nearly finished them and then joined ...”

“... however, it may well be the result of a consciously chosen policy. The key event here is the Richard Wilson exhibition of 1982-3, organised by David Solkin, whose thoughtful and carefully researched catalogue attempted to situate Wilson’s landscapes in a range of historical contexts including the moral and political ideas and ideals attached to the ...”

“... out of the institute in which he is studying for his part in composing a seditious number of a wall newspaper – it contains not a single mention of Comrade Stalin – Pankratov is then suspected of involvement in an imaginary counter-revolutionary conspiracy, picked up by the NKVD and, after long interrogations in prison, exiled to Siberia. Meanwhile ...”

“... Between me and my childhood,’ says Budd Schulberg, ‘is a wall.’ Half-remembered incidents are the loose stones which he must tear away to make a hole big enough to crawl through. There is a Greta Garbo stone (he once pelted her with ripe figs), and stones called Gary Cooper, Freddie March and Sylvia Sidney, but one of the biggest and loosest goes by the name of Clara Bow ...”

“... campaign for the mayoralty, which the long-serving Tom Bradley is about to relinquish. Businessman Richard Riordan, one of 24 candidates to succeed him, seems to be promising that all the unpleasantness of South Central will somehow be removed. He puts it less plainly even than this, however: his paid-for advertising slots include a sound-bite in which a ...”

“... for having nationalised them. 25. The principle of ‘excess profit’ was unacceptable to Richard Nixon’s administration. In an Oval Office meeting on 5 October 1971, the secretary of the treasury, John Connally, described the bill Chile presented to Anaconda and Kennecott as a ‘gauntlet’. ‘Now, it’s our move.’ It was then that Nixon said ...”

“... characters, without situations.’ That is what a certain tradition of philosophy does. But when Richard Rorty describes philosophy as turning to narrative and the imagination, pointing us towards solidarity through ‘the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers’, we seem close to Kundera’s work, and to much traditional thinking ...”

“... In a Sight and Sound interview with Richard Roud Bertolucci says he first had the idea for his film La Luna during a session with his psychoanalyst. ‘I suddenly realised that I had been talking about my father for seven or eight years – and now I wanted to talk about my mother.’ It seems to have taken them an unconscionable time to get around to discussing the person Freud calls a child’s ‘first seducer’, the authentic, original source of love and hunger, but Bertolucci certainly now attacks the subject with brio ...”

“... to leave their homes. The words ‘Cofiwch Dryweryn’ (‘Remember Tryweryn’), written on the wall of a ruined cottage near Aberystwyth, subsequently became a slogan for Welsh nationalism, and the flooding of the valley precipitated the election of the nationalist Plaid Cymru’s first MP, Gwynfor Evans, in 1966. That same year, the village of Aberfan in ...”