“... and ‘thank you’ part of her vocabulary. But in her first official portrait by Paul Emsley, unveiled in January, her eyes are dead and she wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to bugger off. One critic said perceptively that she appeared ‘weary of being looked at’. Another that the portrait might pass ...”

“... thought about this for some time but my thoughts were focused when I saw Isabelle Huppert in Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 film, Elle. The film begins with a rape about which the victim, Huppert, is ambivalent. This sent the critics, particularly male critics, scuttling to and fro wondering whether it was a feminist, post-feminist or anti-feminist film, or ...”

“... dérangée, translated into English in 1996 as A Disgraceful Affair: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Bianca Lamblin. While professing to be a kind of perverse tribute, the Lamblin book is actually a morbid recounting of its author’s adolescent love affair with Simone de Beauvoir, who first seduced her then passed her over – with chilling ...”

“... worries that its imperial powers were atrophying as those of other empires had done (see Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) were allayed by victory in the Cold War and the subsequent discovery that its economy is the driving force for the rest of the world and a model nearly everywhere. After telling a little parable (this is a ...”

“... sat close to the model – from those drawings which include his own reflection in a mirror, or a corner of his sketch-book at the bottom of the sheet. Even (indeed, particularly) when they are done in only a few lines, these drawings tell us a great deal about the way flesh folds and creases in response to a pose – and to keep hold of this kind of ...”

“... her radical beginnings as they did, Dame Iris’s spiritual journey not all that different from Paul Johnson’s.10 February. At Christmas G. and R. gave me a subscription to This England (‘Britain’s Loveliest Magazine’), which at first seemed a conventional magazine of the countryside with thatched cottages, country houses and even Patience ...”

“... not heard of (though she assured me that ‘she had, of course, known the pianist’ – the late Paul Jacobs – ‘very well’); but I almost came a cropper when I confessed I had never listened to Janáček’s The Excursions of Mr Broucek. She gave me a surprised look, then explained, somewhat loftily, that I owed it to myself, as a ‘cultivated ...”

“... Manhattan’s Café Bizarre, when an already enormously famous Andy Warhol (and his canny manager, Paul Morrissey) arrived to offer them a deal. Warhol was in need of music. He, or Morrissey, seems to have known of the group through the overlap between the underground film world and the avant-garde musicians who worked as accompanists. Warhol put them on a ...”

“... period. The Night Battles and The Cheese and the Worms, each a case-study from the north-east corner of Italy, were followed by a synthesis of Eurasian sweep in Ecstasies. The work that has appeared since is no less challenging, but there has been a significant alteration of its forms, and many of its themes. The books of the first twenty years of his ...”

“... sight. Despite the hundreds and hundreds of people trooping past, there, on the grass by the corner of Stable House Street, is a fox. It is just out of the light, slinking by with its head turned towards the parade of people passing, none of whom notice it. It’s quite small, as much fawn as red, and is, I imagine, a vixen. It lopes unhurriedly along ...”

“... a doll when you take away its prop.’ Another comparison: in 1897, Degas writes to his friend Paul Lafond, apologising for not having offered sympathy on the death of Lafond’s brother and the acute illness of his mother. ‘I am becoming dried-up. I have failed to water my heart, and this is the consequence.’ This recalls the formidable Madame ...”

“... was radio’s potential to spark the explosion of hatreds that often seems just around the corner in American political life. ‘I put every single thing I thought I knew into it,’ Stone said much later. ‘I had taken America as my subject, and all my quarrels with America went into it.’With an audience waiting for a new novel, Stone began to look ...”

“... for the illustrated newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s. Lance Calkin, Frank Craig, Samuel Begg, Paul Renouard and others filled the pages of the Illustrated London News, the Graphic and Black and White while continuing to exhibit at the Royal Academy and the Salon. Their newspaper work – its realism and variety of subjects, its experiments with cropping ...”

“... appreciative of language. The colours were too bright perhaps.7 March. Read and enjoy Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts about the lure of in-between places and the edges of cities and other communities. I feel I was on to this years ago in my play The Old Country, when Hilary, a spy in the Foreign Office, describes the venues where he met ...”

“... of ideology. ‘Never again like sheep to the slaughter’ thundered from loudspeakers at every corner. I very much wished to fit into that great activity and take part in the adventure of the birth of a new nation. Naively I believed that action would silence my memories, and I would flourish like the natives, free of the Jewish nightmare, but what could I ...”