“... I’m being a singer.”’ There’s a crucial difference. Everyday British life in the 1980s took a turn towards the performative; style became a matter of exhibiting the right sort of ennui, and having the correct haircut. In our house, we were obsessed with Ferry’s hair, and at one point even my mother had a fringe falling over one eye. Fiona ...”

“... to experience: learning came by way of doing and making. Aligned with the American pragmatism of John Dewey (who was read at the Bauhaus), this idea was advanced by Albers, who took it with him in 1933 when he went to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and later at Yale, where his impact was immense. For ...”

“... Bergman, for example – in that the lead characters in his works influenced the way the creation took shape, often guiding it into entirely new territory. There is an unspoken understanding between the film director and the actor that their involvement isn’t permanent: the actor may be offered a more desirable part, or the director may feel the need to ...”

“... The admission of a professing Jew to Westminster would have occurred sooner or later: that it took place when it did, Dr Alderman writes, was due to a realisation of the potential usefulness of the Jews at the polls. ‘The Whig/Liberal connection wanted votes, and allowed itself to be seduced by the allure of Jewish votes.’ It is at some point during ...”

“... was deliberately allowed by Chiang Kai-shek; the most famous battle of the Long March never took place; Mao attacked India in 1962 with the support of the Soviet Union.Other scoops have important implications for Mao’s character. He poisoned a rival during the Yan’an period. He would send his own soldiers to be massacred if it would help him to move ...”

“... aspect; not for him another shared bottle in El Vino’s (‘Yes, why not?’) before the 8.10 took him home to Farnham. Why waste time drinking with the people from whom he was ‘least likely to glean information’? By ‘information’ Pincher means the stuff governments want to keep private. The encomia at his memoir’s start evoke a picture of him ...”

“... tandem’. When did ‘decade-ism’ – history as wine gums – start? The first decades that took a retrospective grip on the popular imagination were the 1890s and the 1920s. It may not be a coincidence that both have been characterised as fun-loving eras that chucked out staid manners and stale customs, whose social revolutionaries were libertines (Mae ...”

“... blouse and ‘willow-green’ slacks – two colours Matisse liked very much. It worked: Matisse took an immediate liking to Gilot, whose eyebrows reminded him of ‘circumflex accents’, and he declared that he would like to make a portrait of her with green hair. This rattled Picasso, who was so proprietary he once suggested Gilot wear a scarf covering ...”

“... once, to cooking for himself at his $400-a-night cabana at the Chateau Marmont. ‘Cooking crack took practice, but it wasn’t rocket science,’ he writes. ‘I became absurdly good at it – guess that 172 on my LSAT counted for something.’ The tension in Biden’s memoir is between the high-achieving politician’s son and the chronic alcoholic and ...”

“... happening.’ By 10 p.m. Trump was convinced he had triumphed, with plenty to spare. At 10.30 he took a call from Karl Rove, former election guru to George W. Bush, congratulating him on his win. This sealed his mind against all remaining doubt. As Wolff writes: ‘Why would Rove – a man as in with the Beltway Republican establishment as anybody, who ...”

“... house through his reputation as a philosophical virtuoso, and they still valued his opinions and took pleasure in having him at their elbow as a personal ‘living dictionary’. He distinguished himself from other men of letters, moreover, by keeping himself clean and sweet-smelling and retaining a wistful sense of humour. ‘I have never,’ he ...”

“... the TV pictures of the doomed publicity stunt undertaken by the former Minister of Agriculture, John Gummer, showing his attempt to force his daughter Cordelia to eat an over-hot burger and her wise, peremptory rejection of it. Reflect on the work of the American scientist Carleton Gajdusek, who showed the relationship between cannibalism in Papua New ...”

“... painting much, if at all.’ In 1967 she decided the BBC job was ‘too time-consuming’ and took a job at New York’s first ever head shop instead.One night, on the way home to her apartment in St Mark’s Place (four rooms for $67 a month!), she dropped by the Balloon Farm, where she witnessed the Velvet Underground performing its Exploding Plastic ...”

“... not for pigs, or chickens): why would they ban it if there really was nothing to fear? The public took the hint, and began to waver in its passion for beef, and especially beefburgers, which, of course, include bits of dead cow you’d just as soon not know about. Ministers went on making soothing statements. The Agriculture Secretary, then ...”

“... I ought rather to say, this is what some famous and admired translations have in fact been. If you took Pope seriously as to the degree of fidelity required of a translator of Homer (‘to copy him in all the variations of his style and the different modulations of his numbers ... not to neglect even the little figures and turns on the words, nor sometimes the ...”