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“... philistinism of local notables and the formality of the court. A generation later the 25-year-old Richard Strauss was hired, but like others before him felt blocked by petty bureaucrats and insufficiently supported (or recompensed) by his patron. After five years he went back to Munich. The wealthy cosmopolitan Count Harry Kessler moved to Weimar in the ...”

“... first initial and surname: six Wolfs, three Weills (not just Kurt), two Wollheims (neither of them Richard, who was born in England). Celebrated figures such as Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, who went to Turkey, are mentioned only very briefly. Exile was a great leveller – and also a dealer of death. Much of the 20th century has been commemorated in the ...”

“... gay) literary critic Michael Snediker, talking about the photograph of Moss, taken by Richard Avedon, to which he is ‘most attached’: ‘I like that she aestheticises noli me tangere. It’s not that she seems to be in a heroin stupor. It’s that she seems damaged from the outset, as though there’s nothing we (scopophilically or ...”

“... Martin Amis, his second novel, Fullalove (1995), is the memorable and often dazzling story of a ‘wall-shinning, nose-poking, leg-in-the-door’ tabloid hack, a ‘colour man’ sent to the scene of ‘the latest nail-bomb or child-snatch or brutal sex-death’ to colour up the basic story – to ‘give it a bit of ginger’. He soon starts to worry whether ...”

“... in a country house: The service stairs were next to the main stairs, separated only by a wall, but what a difference there was between them: the narrow back stairs, dangerously unrailed, under the bleak gleam of a skylight, each step worn down to a steep hollow, turned tightly in a deep grey shaft; whereas the great main sweep, a miracle of ...”

“... a revelation to Paolozzi when he discovered it in 1948; he soon passed it on to IG colleagues like Richard Hamilton (who produced an extraordinary exhibition on the topic in 1951). For Thompson biological forms are determined by forces both internal and external, such that what appears to be a deformation within a structure is often an adaptation to the ...”

“... virus from a graveyard in Alaska). Black tells of a barnacle-encrusted skull found on the harbour wall of a port in the West of Scotland, no doubt left there by a fisherman who’d trawled it up from the sea floor and couldn’t face the paperwork involved in telling the police. Forensic analysis drew a blank until the carbon dating results were in. ‘This ...”

“... I was in Los Angeles this spring on the day Richard Feynman died. The next morning I saw a banner lowered from the top of the tower block which stands in the middle of the Caltech campus. It read: ‘WE LOVE YOU DICK.’ The obituary of Feynman in the LA Times was awed and affectionate. It listed his achievements – his work in physics, the Nobel Prize it earned him and his work on the nuclear bomb ...”

“... a page of Joyce were more substantial than Dulles’s latest pronouncement or whatever occurred on Wall Street’. Sayre remembers only one evening in the whole of her four years at Harvard ‘that touched on political matters’ (it took place after Adlai Stevenson’s defeat by Eisenhower in 1952). The Korean War, which began in 1950, ‘was too intangible ...”

“... continued nonetheless. (He began this last following a visit with Nancy Cunard to the Lascaux wall-paintings, themselves then newly come to light.) The two books in effect describe the political arc of Swingler’s life from pacifist-into-socialist Popular Front days, through class war, civil war, world war to postwar Labour Government and the faint ...”

“... wrote: ‘Don’t let Lord George fall down the fucking stairs’ in boot polish on the landing wall. The japes were taking a nightmarish turn and in an uneasy political climate grand schemes were getting more serious. In 1974 another Clermont habitué and founder of the SAS, Colonel David Stirling, formed GB75, a vigilante group to be mobilised in the ...”

“... her teeth so you can’t see her smile. Back in the US, Bouvier got engaged to John Husted, a Wall Street stockbroker, but once her mother learned that he earned just $17,000 a year, the engagement was called off. She made gestures towards an entry-level position at the CIA and won the Paris Prize at Vogue – six months working at the magazine in Paris ...”

“... of themselves when they imagine they are performing for an audience of one. On the strength of Richard Mangan’s edition, we must assume that Gielgud’s contribution to the documenting of theatrical history will be uncertain (‘I had never noticed that Albee had such big ears!’) while his contribution to the understanding of bad character is ...”

“... It’s hard to imagine the chair of the BBC board arranging an £800,000 loan for Starmer, as Richard Sharp did for Johnson. But speaking to people within Labour you get the sense that the party often doesn’t recognise the tension between private interests and public office, especially when those involved are what one person described as ‘members of ...”

“... or by collaging them, or simply by using them as source material, as with work by Francis Bacon or Richard Hamilton. Photography has long been used by artists as a substitute for drawing or as an iconic intermediary between reality and representation.Richter makes use of photographs in a way which is both extremely personal, even idiosyncratic, and extremely ...”