“... Picasso the more. One of the great undocumented exchanges – perhaps we shall learn more when John Richardson reaches the war years – came when Picasso spent a week in 1944 trying to persuade Braque to join the Communist Party. Braque denied him, as he also denied a second approach from none other than Simone Signoret (I feel a three-hander play coming ...”

“... their parking lots filled with SUVs.She writes of her father’s jazz records, most importantly John Coltrane. She had a schizophrenic older brother, who teased and bullied her throughout her childhood, leading her to turn off completely, to which she attributes what others have called her remote, detached demeanour, and the need to express the feelings she ...”

“... clarity of seeing, an acknowledgment that this is what painting is. Just as the young John Richardson, visiting Braque’s studio for the first time, felt that he had arrived ‘at the very heart of painting’. But these apparently quiet artists often turn out to have been more far-sighted and more radical than we assume. Corot, for example, once ...”

“... Wedding. It is summer, and 12-year-old Frankie Addams sits at the kitchen table with her cousin John Henry and her black cook Berenice and digs a splinter out of her foot with a knife. The three play bridge with an incomplete deck and they talk until their words almost seem to rhyme. They are a group, but a group Frankie ...”

“... addresses his girlfriend as Angel Drawers. In other words, he’s a cross between Keith Talent and John Self, a London yob whose conflict with the South American wilds is bound to produce much mirthful copy and rich scope for fatso-baiting. Stockton certainly lives up to his role, screaming for tomato ketchup in the middle of nowhere, sulking in his ...”

“... Johnston, William McGrath, Carl Schorske, Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin, Andrew Whiteside and John Boyer testify.* There are a number of plausible reasons for this. The first and most obvious is the great diaspora of Central European scholars brought about by the rise of Nazism in the 1930s – though some intellectuals, like Wittgenstein and ...”

“... is and is not. The story, reprinted in Peake’s Progress, first appeared alongside stories by John Wyndham and William Golding in 1956, in a collection called Sometime, Never. Taken together the three stories read more like fables than fantasy or science fiction, and they glance curiously at the contemporary world they are not directly seeking to ...”

“... half a million Londoners every day by 1910. It was not the biggest chain in Victorian England. John Pearce started off with a coffee stall on the corner of East Road and City Road and by the 1890s had 46 refreshment rooms, 14 with hotels attached. Pearce & Plenty mostly catered for poor workers with ‘large appetites but small means’ as the Caterer put ...”

“... rule’ might be akin to the instructions you’d give someone who knows how to cook when telling them how to make your favourite pasta. They’d have the experience to be able to supply the unstated details (chop up the garlic before you put it in the pan, get a saucepan out, turn on the gas). ‘Thin’ rules, by contrast, typically ...”

“... and soon moved to the Observer. They were collected in the mid-1960s as Len Deighton’s Action Cook Book and Où est le garlic? French Cooking in Fifty Lessons. By that point Deighton was rich and famous, thanks to the runaway success of his early novels – The Ipcress File (1962), Horse under Water (1963), Funeral in Berlin (1964) and Billion-Dollar ...”

“... downwards.’ The profound patriotism of Shelley and Byron, the inability to think logically of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Lewis Carroll? No, it won’t do, and Orwell, for once, was talking through his hat – perhaps relaxing in what he considered an ‘English’ manner. It really seems, then, not quite proper that distinguished experts ...”

“... of nature out of control, the voice of this otherness calling to the soul and making men like Cook pit themselves against an inhuman landscape. By the time of Scott, both to conquer the elements and to be conquered by them had nobility and moral worth. To die with beautiful resignation in a place inimical to life itself, to be able to say as Scott ...”

“... Mr Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh.) And the realisation of what separation means, put forward by John Bowlby and others, ended the disastrous practice of keeping parents away from child patients in hospitals. In North London, more was being learned about children separated from their families. At Anna Freud’s Hampstead Nurseries, first set up as a refuge ...”

“... as the craft of journalism. Women may work now but we have ‘fast food restaurants’, ready-to-cook ‘chilled meals from Tesco and Marks & Spencer’. Most wonderfully, we also have Delia Smith, ‘who explains much of what the knowledge economy is about’. Leadbeater is too busy ‘to learn at first hand what makes her chicken in sherry wine vinegar ...”

“... squire, his prioress, his friar, his monk, his lawyer, his clerk, his merchant, his carpenter, his cook and so on, including, thank heaven, his good wife from Bath, whose virtue most immediately is that she enables the poet to rhyme ‘deef’ and ‘Ypres’ within the first four lines – and internally to boot. Happily, Gray includes all of them in The Book ...”