“... there’s a famous après-Deco portrait by Tamara de Lempicka from 1933 – and Yvonne George, a Belgian cabaret star who swept the poet Robert Desnos off his feet. Members of the Brigade des moeurs were biddable, and liked to get a slice of the action, whatever it happened to be. They didn’t have much in the way of convictions, in any ...”

“... like a pig’s back). We stare out along the coast to Tory Island, the home of the great naive painter, James Dixon. Below us Donegal is green, still, silent and peaceful. I’m too tired that evening to open either Himself Alone or The Idiot, and in any case I want to a make a start on a new book, a collection of short essays on single poems. I wish I’d ...”

“... great violence to my own disposition which is to shun, rather than court, regard,’ he told the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon in 1815. Barker makes it clear that he went against the wishes of ‘his more practical womenfolk’ in refusing until he was in his late fifties to truck with the periodical press. He boasted to one editor that he had ‘never ...”

“... that his children’s English nanny, with whom he may have had an affair, was a spy sent by Lloyd George, and paced the family home brandishing a revolver. He committed himself to a hospital in Hamburg, before moving to a private clinic in Jena in 1920 and then to Ludwig Binswanger’s Bellevue sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, where other postwar burnouts included ...”

“... and hiss, ‘No sleeping!’ One regular, always with a pile of art books at his elbow, was the painter Jacob Kramer, some of whose paintings, with their Vorticist slant, hung in the art gallery next door. Dirty and half-tight there wasn’t much to distinguish him from the other tramps whiling away their time before trailing along Victoria Street to spend ...”

“... for me into a series of paintings by Gustave Moreau (appropriately, Flaubert’s favourite modern painter). The novel is forceful, highly coloured, sensationalist, and yet somehow inert, despite, or because of, all the learning and research that went into it. Does it feel like a work of art in the wrong genre? Maupassant did call it ‘an opera in prose’.I ...”

“... of that Surrey speciality, the gated High Class Suburb (as Nairn, no ironist, called them): St George’s Hill, Wentworth, Camilla Lacey and so on. They would come in time to be valued by persons greedy for plastic columns: white collar criminals, oligarchs’ security apes, footballers, light entertainers and seedy golf pros – the improbable successors ...”

“... politicians, freelance journalists, ex-Sixties activists (including, quaintly, a Pop Art painter) and the members of the Short Strand Martyrs Memorial Flute Band.’ There is a sense here that Foster really enjoyed writing the word ‘quaintly’ and, since this book appeared, there have been earnest letters to the Irish newspapers to point ...”

“... him, and constitutes ‘the spiritual climax of this book’. An Abstract Expressionist painter called Rabo Karabekian, who until this point has seemed to be a kind of charlatan, fairly blatantly exploiting the culture-vulture mentality of Midland City by selling to its new arts centre for $50,000 a huge painting entitled The Temptation of St ...”

“... of Turkey joining the European Union’. Speaking at a Nato summit in Turkey in June 2004, George Bush hailed Pamuk’s work as ‘a bridge between cultures’, and claimed it showed that ‘people in other continents and civilisations’ are ‘exactly like you’. Praise from Bush couldn’t have pleased Pamuk, but the speechwriters had done their ...”

“... into unfamiliar territory. In his easy vernacular, Crozier tamps down language with the skill of a painter achieving a rare equivalence of terms on the canvas. Often, too, we find an observed action or a local detail quickly entailed to something larger and simpler: the pattern of day and night, seasonal change, or the slippage of light and shadow. This has ...”

“... actors in my first play, Forty Years On, which was running in the West End. One of the actors was George Fenton, who is doing the music for the film, and another was Keith McNally, the proprietor of Balthazar.15 January. The police officer who shot Mark Duggan is to be returned to firearms duty just as was the officer who shot Jean Charles de Menezes. The Met ...”

“... Latour. The plan seems to have stalled there.In early 1893, Satie started a relationship with the painter and former trapeze artist Suzanne Valadon. She kept two cats to whom she fed caviar on Fridays and described as ‘good Catholics’, as well as a goat, who ate any art she wasn’t pleased with. Satie recognised a kindred spirit and the two fell in ...”

“... in themselves, and with potentially terrible consequences of exposure and professional ruin. Sir George Mowbray Bt, chairman of Berkshire County Council, spent a drunken hour in Piccadilly Circus underground station, where he ‘smiled, nodded and looked’ at other men. In court he explained he was happily married with three children and at home ‘drank ...”

“... Similarly, allegorical or other references to the end of time link writers and works as diverse as George Bernard Shaw (Heartbreak House), Henri Barbusse (Under Fire) and Karl Kraus (The Last Days of Mankind). They all, Winter argues, ‘turned back to the ancient tradition of apocalyptic drama’. Even the English war poets, usually Exhibit A for Hynes and ...”