“... Such predatoriness might be put down to nominative determinism: ‘Shchukin’, I was informed, is close to shchouka, Russian for ‘pike’. Both Morozov and Shchukin bought Impressionists and post-Impressionists; they were equally avid for Monet and Cézanne and Van Gogh and Gauguin and Matisse. Shchukin had eight Cézannes, Morozov 18; Shchukin had 16 ...”

“... of 1935, when he was 18, Robert Lowell and two friends from St Mark’s School – Blair Clark and Frank Parker – rented a house in Nantucket. Under Lowell’s direction, they studied the Bible (with special attention to the Book of Job) and ate cereal with raw honey and ‘badly’ cooked eels. Lowell decided that Clark should quit smoking and, when Clark ...”

“... named characters get drawn into Vernon’s orbit and Despentes enters and exits their heads using close third-person narration, sometimes switching focus several times in a single chapter. The plot dilates and dilates to introduce different ‘types’ of contemporary Parisian: a trans e-cigarette salesman, a far-right moped courier, a secondary school ...”

“... all these sentences could have been written by the same person, the person who wrote ‘Frank drops me off outside the sisters’ flat,’ ‘You could hear the kids yelling in the pool,’ ‘I could hear kids on the waste ground behind me,’ ‘The travel-agent smoked in the empty church’ – first sentences, by different writers, from an ...”

“... unassailable classics, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks, pretty close. Partly the problem seems to have been Dylan’s bewilderment at the opportunities afforded by a modern 32-track studio. In the old days he’d go in with a batch of songs and record them as fast as possible. The solo Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) was ...”

“... else can only be known by getting inside and asking questions. Tracking down a Sullivan Bank or a Frank Lloyd Wright house in its native habitat, seeing the physical context of buildings which also have an art-historical context: these are pleasures and an education. The assumptions which the taxonomy of style and the hierarchies of art history underpin can ...”

“... of a banker, owner of a Victorian house, mother of two. When Michel engages Natalie’s husband Frank in conversation about his attempts at investing online, it’s mildly embarrassing. Leah doesn’t covet the lifestyles of bankers and lawyers (except the way they can afford to be ‘moral’ by buying organic food); she spends more time fretting about why ...”

“... James novel, and all he thinks about is his neighbour’s legacy, or more precisely ‘what old Frank would have done with the fruits of his swindle, on the occasion of the rupture that had kept them apart in hate and vituperation for so many years’. It’s a great beginning, but what we have of the completed novel is only more of the beginning. The ...”

“... I still like to believe that players like Pancho Gonzales, Rod Laver, Lew Hoad, Jaroslav Drobny, Frank Sedgman, Don Budge and Jack Kramer were as good if not better than the present lot – Sampras, Agassi, Moya, Kafelnikov, Rios and so on. The only first-class pre-World War Two player I ever saw was Henri Cochet, who had occasionally beaten the great Tilden ...”

“... argued to have stumbled. Instead of demanding that the military step down, the activists urged ‘frank and sincere discussions’, disappointing some of their supporters and significantly reducing pressure on the regime. The military dug in, jailing NLD members and even several revered monks. Burma has not held a real election since. After 1990, Wintle seems ...”

“... listening, offering responses, outwardly quite normal – an illusion that lasted until one came close enough to hear what she was saying. What sounded like real words, even real phrases, ‘eerie felicities’, as Bayley called them, still sometimes came out of her mouth. It is impossible to know what such things mean when they come from someone for whom ...”

“... in particular, are reminiscent of the stylised portraits of Modigliani (Hamnett was a close friend of his). Her bust-length paintings aren’t set in recognisable interiors but place their sitters against muted backgrounds of grey, blue, ochre, brown with a hint of green. In a preface to Hamnett’s show at the Eldar Gallery in 1918, Sickert – a ...”

“... shared the romance of being a part of it in old New York. For me, the city didn’t just mean Frank Sinatra and Studio 54, it meant Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling, Lillian Hellman and Susan Sontag. I loved its papers, the swagger of the contributors, the New York intellectuals, with their neuroses, their arguments, their marriages, and their ...”

“... that a very great artist – who has now in a sensationally short space of time become a very close friend – unexpectedly asked if I would like to be drawn by him. I refer, of course, to Lucian Freud, the product of whose activity is to be seen on the cover of the London Review of Books. I do not think I hesitated for a moment when he asked me. I was ...”

“... in Gargnano, Brescia Province, where a large part of The Rotters’ Club was written’ comes close). And yet he’s only being honest. A Touch of Love is indeed influenced by Simone Weil and it is only polite to thank those who have assisted the author with country retreats and Martinis at five. Confessions are evidence of a conscience, and thus to be ...”