“... Saatchi’s taste is eclectic. It’s not all Goldsmiths’: the 35 artists are no more than one man’s pleasure – and one woman’s duty. No one could credibly admire all these 35 varied artists or admire them equally: 35 bursts of unqualified enthusiasm would sound ridiculous. On the other hand, clear discriminations are clearly out. So a non-judgmental ...”

“... guns or not. Fianna Fail was ‘a slightly constitutional party’, Sean Lemass, who succeeded de Valera as party leader in 1959, declared in 1928. Fine Gael, on the other hand, respected law and order. Its members were richer than us. Solicitors, big shopkeepers and big farmers were all Fine Gael. Secretly, we believed, they were pro-British, not as Irish ...”

“... out of a sack into a hopper to join St Matthew’s angel, St Mark’s lion, St Luke’s ox and St Paul with his sword. They are ground into the pure flour of hope, faith and love, scooped up and bagged by Erasmus the miller under the supervision of the dove of the Holy Ghost and handed on to Luther the baker, bent over his kneading tub. The Church hierarchy ...”

“... In 1890, the neo-Impressionist Paul Signac offered to paint Félix Fénéon, the very coiner, four years previously, of the term ‘neo-Impressionist’. The critic-subject responded with modest evasiveness, and then a proviso: ‘I will express only one opinion: effigy absolutely full-face – do you agree?’ Signac did not agree ...”

“... She is a CIA bigwig responding to a senator’s aide who is sure the agency has sent an innocent man off to an unnamed North African country for questioning. Or for pointless violence and humiliation, since nobody really believes he knows anything. This is a decent liberal movie caught up itself in the double-think of the War on Terror. I’m sure the writer ...”

“... Last year, my father-in-law died. He was a complicated, difficult, intelligent man; the obituary-ese would be ‘colourful’. On occasion, when he was alive, I wanted him to go to hell. But when I sat at his deathbed, and looked at the body from which life had ebbed, I couldn’t help marvelling at the longevity, persistence and garish exuberance of the concept of the afterlife ...”

“... So characteristic of Paul Muldoon’s poetry as to be almost a hallmark is the moment, unnerving and exciting in about equal measures, when his speaker is suddenly revealed to himself as someone else. The whole world expands and changes in ‘Cass and Me’ when, as a boy, he climbs on the older Cass’s shoulders, and they lean out                across the yard As a giant would across the world ...”

“... of running dry. Even so, the simultaneous appearance of two studies of Louis from Les Editions de Minuit is a little surprising: did the right hand know what the left hand was publishing? What is more, both books are concerned with the King’s public image, rather than his policies or his private life. One book deals with court festivals, the other with ...”

“... finds him and a woman in a tableau he takes to be charged with erotic humiliation: ‘A young man, wearing only underpants, was kneeling before a young, fully dressed woman … The girl tossed her head, and her hair swung softly around her; she gave him such a look of contempt, while his son trembled in his abject state.’ Armand manages to leave the ...”

“... and to be a spectator to the disgusting superpower aggression that was levelling ‘every work of man in Vietnam’ (General LeMay, speaking approvingly) as well as reducing its population by a million or two. The clear lineal descent of this policy from Japanese and French imperialism, the relentless campaign of lying and falsification by which it was ...”

“... that Joanna Drew, a curator at the Hayward Gallery, had found cocoons huddled in the slits of his Man with a Sheep, Picasso said that at Vauvenargues one day he had felt a wasps’ nest between the sheep’s legs; nothing more natural: animals lurking in the animal. Picasso always wanted the statue to be accessible to everyone, so that the children could play ...”

“... pondered this question the career of Jacques Doriot has always had a special fascination. Now Jean-Paul Brunet has ransacked just about everything – including police files – in order to put the full story together. He has an amazing story to tell. Doriot was the only child of a working-class family, his father a blacksmith forced into factory work and a ...”

“... her, the most famous of which, Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (1872), was, according to Paul Valéry, the best thing since Vermeer. They are his equivalent of Monet’s cathedral fronts, a set of pictures of the same scene but with different weather. They are also an intense exchange between subject and artist – some think Manet was in love with ...”

“... had a wife and was called James. He was ‘sober, steady, strong and active’. Of course he was a man. Only after Allen’s death, as news of the autopsy spread, did some people begin to express different opinions: they’d always noticed his lack of facial hair, they said, and oddly high voice. But, even then, for every person who feminised Allen in ...”

“... In the spring​ of 1944, a young man was stopped at a checkpoint of the Pétainist milice outside the Saint-Germain-des-Prés metro station. According to his identity card, he was Julien Keller, aged seventeen, a dyer, born in the département of the Creuse. The bag he was carrying contained dozens of other fake identity papers ...”