“... 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 ...”

“... out in the cold. In ‘Wooden Ships’, a post-nuclear daydream, the singers – Grace Slick and Paul Kantner – are sailing away from America, exchanging iodine tablets with other survivors and looking back at figures on the shoreline moving around in silver hazmat suits. ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, a travesty of the national anthem performed on a ...”

“... scale and the scarcity of water must have been terrifying to anyone crossing it by beast or on foot. On a hot day, water is sucked straight out of your skin, and you can feel how fast dying of thirst could be, but the aridity is what makes the air so clear, what opens up those fifty-mile views. Now with air conditioning and interstates and the option of ...”

“... is still Italian, however, as is the landscape, as is the position of the railway station at the foot of a hill (which probably has a town wearily high up at the top of it), as is the calm of the loos in those overly spacious Fascist station buildings. It will not do to reimagine the scene as the Lake District during a heatwave. But where does Italy stop and ...”

“... and David have hitherto regarded as talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William Shakespeare (although to be fair they despise the comedies and some of the history plays ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on the Western Front increased from 3.25 million to more than four million men by April 1918. Paul von Hindenburg, a stolid general who effectively replaced the kaiser as the figurehead of the German war effort after being brought out of retirement to win spectacular victories on the Eastern Front early in the war, and Quartermaster-General Erich ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the west we could see the ridges of Mt Gràmos, the CDA’s last toehold on Greek soil, where Paul Eluard came to visit their trenches and harangue the imperialist lackeys arrayed against them through a megaphone. They were driven out of their positions by US Helldivers – the first use of napalm in warfare. From where we leave the pick-up you can just ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... place by chance in Paris, on the afternoon of 28 June 1964. Paz describes it in Viento Entero. In Paul Blackburn’s translation:              The fallen birdbetween rue Montalembert and rue de Bacis a girl              held backat the edge of a precipice of looks. . .A marching battalion of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... demise. He has been hit on the head with a hammer and stabbed in the heart with a chisel ‘at the foot of his famous frescoes’. An erudite murder mystery set several hundred years ago in Italy can’t help but recall The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, who makes an appearance in Binet’s earlier novel The Seventh Function of Language – though where ...”

“... baskets of white bread were put out for the poor. Some five thousand troops gathered, on horse and foot, as Sir John Strangways, a local royalist, proclaimed the end of eleven years of the republic. A contemporary source describes a procession of ‘maidens, at least a hundred in number’, dressed in white waistcoats and led by a woman beating a drum; ‘both ...”