“... creative process. Steichen’s photographs, which were so revealing of Rodin’s intentions, also took the work into a timeless world. His ‘Balzac’, for instance, isolated against the moonlit sky, is, like the interpretation of a musical score, a work of art made from a work of art. Photography allowed both the activity of making sculpture – the changes ...”

“... the presence of ideologues, and reading between the lines one can see why the hard men of polities took care to keep him at arm’s length. From the historian’s point of view Amery was not a model diarist. He began too late to record the inside history of the Tariff Reform League, and from 1906 to l922 often fell down on the job, leaving large gaps in the ...”

“... love. The book begins with Mimi – whose husband is in India for work – hosting a party for Mrs John D. Rockefeller III, ‘president of the Museum of Modern Art’, in her tastefully furnished home. At the party she encounters Tom Potts, an assistant of Mrs Rockefeller’s, and becomes infatuated. Potts knows where to buy Hermès scarves and bags at a ...”

“... rather than attempt to exhume a real hero of their own. They thought they could finish off poor John Stuart Mill, but they never succeeded, except in their own estimation. Now, however, we are faced with what may be an even more forlorn effort, to fold Thomas Carlyle to their collective bosom. It so happens that Carlyle had a famous quarrel with Mill, in ...”

“... attempts to mollify Bloom for having cruelly depicted her in his novel Deception; the review by John Updike of Operation Shylock that drives Roth to commit himself to a psychiatric hospital, suffering from a nervous breakdown; the arsenal of psychotropics (Lithium, Halcion, Xanax, Valium, Prozac) used to calm the couple’s respective nervous systems as ...”

“... of State for Foreign Affairs. That was fully up to the level of prickliness displayed by John Thadeus Delane, editor of the Times, in his famous exchange with Lord Derby over the accession to power of Napoleon III 28 years earlier, and serves to show that, even if the Standard had allowed its financial independence to be corrupted, it never permitted ...”

“... family history is left as vague as the public history. The circumstances in which their migration took place, their contact with family members still in Japan, or indeed with other Japanese-Americans – all this must be gathered from apparently casual, glancing or incomplete allusions. (They are not casual, of course; Otsuka shows unsentimentally how the ...”

“... Saturdays, so as to catch the kiddies before bedtime, or clubtime, or drugtime, or whatever, but John Birt’s non-sporting apparatchiks kept on shoving the show further and further towards midnight. And Des was cross, too, about the BBC’s failure to secure the rights to various big games – internationals, FA cup ties, European Champions League fixtures ...”

“... and Expressionism; in the readymade and in Dada’s exploitation of industrial raw materials (John Heartfield’s political photomontages would have been impossible without collage); and even Abstract Expressionism (as Clement Greenberg argued, the little pockets of ‘depth’ that pucker the surfaces of Cubist paintings presage the hills and crannies in ...”

“... voices recorded from the crowds, such as the Euston Square prostitute who startled the teenage John Lane, future publisher of the Yellow Book, by asking fortuitously: ‘Johnnie darling, won’t you come home with me?’ Even when he’s not quoting directly, White’s stories and statistics are chiefly drawn from contemporary sources. Here, then, is an ...”

“... on Germany in 1990, Trevor-Roper faced her down and tore her arguments to pieces. The historian John Habakkuk was an editor of Economic History Review in 1952 when Trevor-Roper’s onslaught against R.H. Tawney landed on his desk. He mused: ‘I find it difficult to decide whether T-R is a fundamentally nice person in the grip of a prose style in which it ...”

“... Nestor, venerated from far and near as the oracular source of wisdom on Italian art, ‘II Bibi’ took on an iconic quality. In the public mind, he became the incarnation of Renaissance man, sustaining an exquisite humanism amidst the detritus of European cultural collapse. This must have been gratifying, for Berenson had long yearned to be identified with ...”

“... steady companion called Hucks, picturesquely intent on a walking tour of North Wales. Their route took them through Oxford, where they looked up one of Coleridge’s old schoolmates, who took the visitors to see a notorious democrat at Balliol called Robert Southey. It was an encounter that, Southey would recall, ‘fixed ...”

“... War, because strong language – like strong drink – is a way to alleviate despair. In 1930, John Brophy and Eric Partridge published a collection of British songs and slang from the war. They claimed that soldiers used the word ‘fucking’ so often that it was merely a warning ‘that a noun is coming’. In a normal situation, swear words are used ...”

“... York’s Lower East Side, the whole family had appeared to be so unremarkable that the historian John Neville would say that ‘they might have been chosen at random from the telephone directory.’ Ethel’s father, Barney Greenglass, repaired sewing machines. Her mother, Tessie, was from Galicia (now part of Ukraine), and raised their four children in a ...”