“... to brilliant effect, working with some of France’s best film composers, including Martial Solal, Paul Misraki and Georges Delerue. But there was sometimes so little dialogue that his assistants wondered what the actors were supposed to do. ‘On va dilater,’ he would tell them – ‘We’re going to stretch out’ – like a jazz musician discussing how ...”

“... Sun Wot Won It’; and more recent governments convinced themselves that the Daily Mail under Paul Dacre’s editorship was the voice of the electorate. In reality, Beaverbrook often got public opinion quite wrong and made his papers announce imminent triumph for parties that then lost elections – most spectacularly in 1945. William Maxwell ...”

“... Lewis had an affair, came to the conclusion that ‘on the whole, he was half a SHIT,’ while Paul Nash told Lewis that his character was ‘strangely sub-human’. His bellicosity towards those reckless enough to be generous towards him was even fiercer: when a cheque from his patron Fanny Wadsworth didn’t turn up promptly, she received a postcard that ...”

“... with Augustine). Following a line of argument in the writings of Jesus’s contemporary admirer Paul of Tarsus, who never met Jesus in his earthly life but shaped much subsequent Christian thought, Augustine emphasised that humanity’s disobedience left it helpless before God’s wrath. If God chose to exercise mercy, that was his business; humanity had no ...”

“... drummer, Robert Wyatt, his Cockney tenor cracking with fervour, once sang:I’m nearly five foot seven tallI like to smoke and drink and ballI’ve got a yellow suit that’s made by Pamand every day I like an egg and some teabut most of all I like to talk about me.The American poet Wallace Stevens liked his tea – he took to it in connoisseurship and ...”

“... Yet he ended his life in comfort, thanks partly to du Bellay, and was buried with honour in St Paul’s Church in Paris. (When that church was demolished they managed to lose his body.) To the end of his life he proudly remained priest and doctor. Of all his books, the text most widely found in older libraries is not one of the volumes of Gargantua or ...”

“... Lesson of the Master’, Henry St George, the older novelist, offers the young writer Paul Overt a demonstration in self-sufficiency. He tells him a writer would do better not to marry, to put his passion into his work. Then marries the girl they both admire. That doesn’t stop Paul Overt offering an encomium ...”

“... air force bought some to shield radar installations in the Arctic and on mountain-tops; and a 200-foot-high ‘skybreak’ dome sheltered the American pavilion at Expo 67, the Montreal World Fair. The structure was inspiring in its democratic simplicity. It looked as if anyone who could piece together one of the triangles could piece together the whole thing ...”

“... had christened the doll ‘Popau’ – the nickname of the right-wing politician and journalist Paul de Cassagnac, famous for his skills as a duellist. A letter Julia, aged ten, wrote to her 11-year-old cousin in June 1889 provides a glimpse of the life of upper-class children in late 19th-century Paris: trips to the Opéra to see Romeo and Juliet, to the ...”

“... gathered and the guests stood up to sing ‘Happy Birthday’. Then came the carving of a three-foot-square cake embossed with a likeness in icing of the poet’s head, his cautious smile carried on layers of sponge in blue and yellow stripes, two of the four colours of the island’s flag, blue for the sea and yellow for sunshine. St Lucia likes to remind ...”

“... been seduced by images of the thrusting New York skyline. Influenced by the utopian futurism of Paul Scheerbart, author of Glasarchitektur, Mies proposed a 20-storey tower completely sheathed in glass. It would have loomed over Berlin like an enormous faceted crystal: each wall was positioned at a slight angle to reflect and refract the light.6 He was fond ...”

“... of the Glenn Pool oilfield nearby. The self-proclaimed Oil Capital of the World, where J. Paul Getty began the career that made him the world’s richest man, had seen its population grow 300 per cent over the previous decade, from 18,000 to 72,000 people. Around 10,000 residents were African Americans living in Greenwood, a flourishing neighbourhood ...”

“... doesn’t). She loved jazz, but resigned from the Gargoyle Club when she wasn’t allowed in with Paul Robeson. She crossed the Khyber Pass, then closed to women, disguised as a man; became ‘wildly socialistic and revolutionary’ in Paris; campaigned with H.G. Wells against the teaching of patriotic history. One of her students at the LSE testified: ‘At ...”

“... them) lining the grand staircase. A naked baby appears as a symbol of contemporary art: at the foot of the stairs, a photographer (George Platt Lynes) zaps the scribbling infant with flashbulbs; on the balcony labelled ‘Museum of Modern Art’, the baby plays hopscotch on a Mondrian, surrounded by Picassos; and at the top of the stairs, the Met’s ...”

“... had a mannered post-humous quality. In the most sinister photos, he seems to be standing with one foot squarely planted on the neck of posterity. This camp deadpan, evident despite the bravura of the letters, was not Ginsberg’s style at all. Burroughs’s correspondent would eventually become a generous, open-hearted queen, but, like Whitman, a republican ...”