“... 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 ...”

“... for God’s sake, I don’t need it.’ James Knowlson’s biography reports that when his painter friend Henri Hayden was hospitalised in 1962 he looked after the Haydens’ tax bills as well as their rent. Beckett was, in other words, beginning to resemble the otherworldly, saintly figure of later legend, down to being, by this stage, craggily ...”

“... and later donated to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where it still resides. When the Romantic painter Benjamin Robert Haydon heard news of the discovery he wrote excitedly to his friend Keats: ‘If this is not Shakespeare who is it? … As sure as you breathe & that he was the first of beings the Seal belonged to him – Oh Lord!’ The sceptic might ...”

“... dialectic between ‘the daily life with its successes and disasters’ and ‘the inner life of a painter who might have said, with Jung: “If I had left these images hidden in my emotions, they might have torn me in pieces.”’ The work’s images thus become what Fitzgerald, following her subject, calls its ‘burden’, the points at which physical ...”

“... by learning to box, by falling in love with a boy he referred to as ‘Dick’ (actually called George Harcourt Vanden-Bempde-Johnstone, later 3rd Baron Derwent), and by joining a poetry society run by some charismatic masters. He said in his autobiography, Goodbye to All That, written in 1929 when he was only 34, that by the end of his time at Charterhouse ...”

“... is assumed if the individual belongs to a dominant group (‘white writer’ or ‘heterosexual painter’, for instance). If I’m opposed to routine psychological reductionism or any other attempt to formulate a totalising interpretation of an individual, by the same token I distrust a resistance to the obvious. Genet was homosexual and wrote about ...”