“... lived a life of stealthy masquerade as an English doctor, before committing suicide late in life; Paul Bereyter, a German who because of his part-Jewish ancestry was prohibited from teaching during the Third Reich, never recovered from this setback, and later committed suicide; Sebald’s great-uncle, Adelwarth, who arrived in America in the 1920s, worked as ...”

“... RAF documentary Squadron 992 and appearing as the compere in the variety show Rainbow Round the Corner. Along with the BBC’s senior announcer, Leslie Mitchell, he became a voice of authority, the tone of war and peace, the man whom people heard in the cinema on the newsreels produced by British Movietone. Gamlin was a star. Terence Gallacher, who worked ...”

“... the colour of spring.’ Champcommunal was more fashion-conscious than Todd; she knew people like Paul Poiret – the first person to design a dress, it’s said, that a woman could put on by herself. It’s not clear how the early editors were chosen, or what qualifications were expected in a country where to be fashionable had long meant to be vulgar and ...”

“... These get-rich-quick, self-made men from the South-West brought to politics the same instinct for corner-cutting that they had shown in their business careers, and the Administration was quickly acknowledged as the most corrupt since Harding’s. The extraordinary resilience of this group suggests it is here to stay in future Republican administrations. A ...”

“... metal or reinforced concrete frames. Demolitions of a slower kind are depicted in an exhibition of Paul Hester’s photographs of Houston, ‘The Elusive City’, shown at the Menil Collection, the serenely long and luminous museum by Renzo Piano which is one of Houston’s most treasured resources. Hester’s vision is rather at odds with it: he has a clever ...”

“... working hours, the long absences from home, the aphrodisiac of power’ for dilemmas of this sort. Paul Johnson, in the same issue, was uncharacteristically backward in dishing out his unfashionable medicine: ‘Cecil Parkinson may have broken one of the Ten Commandments. He has also been foolish. But there has been nothing vicious in his behaviour. He has ...”

“... he remarks: I have seen with my own eyes a dissident poet eating whitebait and joking from the corner of his mouth. The basis of his complaint is that in England the poet can be neither dissident nor dignified laureate, and is therefore condemned to be a harmless and neglected figure. Adam Czerniawski, who has translated both Herbert and Rozewicz, is one ...”

“... increases with the anxiety to find quick answers to questions that arise. In respect of the only corner of the field with which I can claim familiarity, the book falls into both traps. One of their sources, central to their whole undertaking, calls for comment. In recent years there has been a spate of papers and tracts, some privately published, most ...”

“... story. I look at a framed text over the fireplace: Christians should endeavour, as the Apostle Paul commands them, to live peaceably with all men (Romans 12, v. 18) even with those of a different religious persuasion. Issued November, 1863 Nice touch that ‘even’, like a grudging knuckle showing. On the flagged floor I notice a crust of wheaten farl ...”

“... not turn up in some context or other, from Picasso and the Douanier Rousseau to Nancy Cunard and Paul Poiret. Brancusi’s work was the first to turn to, still is perhaps, if you wished to point to a sculpture of essences. It was (until Henry Moore) the cartoonist’s favoured notion of modern sculpture – in 1926 the New Yorker published a drawing by Helen ...”

“... themselves. Monet stumbled across Daubigny painting by the Thames, who put him in touch with Paul Durand-Ruel, that ‘Napoleon of dealers’, who had led a troop of 35 crates onto foreign soil and opened a gallery on New Bond Street; Durand-Ruel told Monet where he could find Pissarro, who was staying in Norwood with his mother and ...”

“... distance – becomes speedily distant. Behind the glass of the Feltham cop shop’s noticeboard, Paul Stephenson declared: ‘I am today an immensely proud policeman to be entrusted with leadership of the Met’ – but that was back in January 2009. We found the Travelodge in the eight-storey Axiom House, which forms an integral part of a shopping centre ...”

“... of reading Nelson is getting introduced to them: Catherine Opie and A.L. Steiner, Chris Burden and Paul McCarthy, Ryan Trecartin and Mike Kelley, Nao Bustamante and William Pope.L. Nelson spends less time on work that, in her view, is stupid, arrogant or exploitative. Names that come up in this context tend to be better known to mainstream audiences: Neil ...”

“... bag containing 13 books (the usual suspects plus Ernst Jünger, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Jean Paul) across the battlefields. When he was finally captured and sent to a temporary camp in France, his first punishment was having to hear the loudspeakers around the fence blasting out Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ fortissimo for nine days and nights without ...”

“... of these plague-ridden times? Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists delved into almost every dark corner of their audiences’ imaginations: murder, witchcraft, incest, civil war, apostasy. Playgoers saw rape victims stagger onstage and flinched as throats were slit and eyes gouged out. But one thing they never saw depicted was plague or its victims. Despite ...”