“... and Edward Steichen – and look! here’s Stieglitz himself, whose portrait Cartier-Bresson took in 1946, the lastyear of the great forerunner’s life. Stieglitz’s face has a weary look not unlike that of Robert Flaherty, father of the documentary film, another great forerunner whose portrait Cartier-Bresson ...”

“... public perfomances as a musician. Literature, even more than music, was an art which the Romans took seriously, and about which we know quite a lot: its absence is a shortcoming in an account of the Roman world. Although their work has the subtitle ‘Economy, Society and Culture’ – ‘Culture’ being the title of their tenth, last and weakest chapter ...”

“... winding round the other, each in itself interesting to follow: the investigative routine, ‘Who took the child, and where, and how, and why, and for whose benefit?’ and the psychological question, ‘What sort of people are these, whose lives have interacted, whose failures meet in the crisis of this moment?’ The sort of people who surround Davy, and ...”

“... for the Great Renunciation by projecting his suppressed desire onto the subordinate female. Men took an exhibitionistic pride in the ‘vicarious display’ of the well-dressed women who accompanied them. Naturally the women needed men to manage this imagery. As Hollander puts it, during the 19th century men invented fictions of women for themselves as ...”

“... and always looked smart; as Grant recalled, she ‘tried to smother me with care’. Both parents took him to the cinema. With his mother, Archie went to the genteel Claire Street Picture House (romances, melodramas and tea on the balcony); with his father he went to the brash, barn-like Metropole (slapstick, bad piano-playing and lots of men smoking). Archie ...”

“... Eliot in the Houghton Library; Tennyson’s In Memoriam; Lyndall Gordon’s Eliot’s Early Years; John Mayer’s T.S. Eliot’s Silent Voices; Laforgue’s Hamlet, Mélanges posthumes, Le Concile féerique, and ‘Esthét-ique’; Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature; Maeterlinck’s essay ‘Silence’; Boswell’s Johnson; the OED; Paradise ...”

“... and which came to them by various routes from Caravaggio, would not have suited her. The painter John Opie is reported to have found Vigée Le Brun’s pictures good in ‘the imitation of particular things, velvet, silk etc’ but he also remarked that they gave him ‘no high pleasure as works of art’. Hoppner, more brutally, found even her way with ...”

“... Block Mask author – Hammett wrote his last book, The Thin Man, the same year – and Chandler took his place. Since he wrote slowly and deliberately he barely made a living from his fiction. It was only six years later, with The Big Sleep, his first novel and the first appearance of Marlowe, that he and Cissy could afford to move to the house where they ...”

“... the ‘politics of mana’ which characterised the aggressive competitiveness of iwi culture, they took initiatives in greeting the new forces brought by the Europeans and appropriating them to their own perceived needs. They took to farming, trading, gunpowder and literacy, including Biblical Christianity; they set up an ...”

“... the rule of law, was Alfredo Stroessner’s regime in Paraguay in the 1960s and 1970s, which took the logic of the state of exception to an absurd, still unsurpassed extreme. Under Stroessner, Paraguay was – with regard to its Constitutional order – a ‘normal’ parliamentary democracy with all freedoms guaranteed; however, since, as Stroessner ...”

“... Maxim Gorky, the historian M.N. Pokrovsky and the English Communist intellectual Maurice Dobb. He took to the new creed with fanatical excitement and all the convert’s zeal to proselytise. ‘What Lenin gave me was above all clarity and reality. The idealist servitude of my mind had made the free exercise of my intelligence impossible.’ Pares was not ...”

“... women tried to look down and away and sideways. Women were among the sights that flâneurs took in as they slid through the crowds on the streets, but to look boldly in return was to designate oneself a woman of ill repute. The gazes which whizzed about and knocked and glanced against each other in the streets of Paris were an imaginative nexus from ...”

“... a rabies powder under his own name; Dr Hans Sloane marketed medicinal chocolate; Dr Nehemiah Grew took out a patent on Epsom Salts. How to make a medical reputation in such a world? How to make a medical living? A satirist advised the upwardly mobile young London physician ‘to make all the Noise and Bustle you can, to make the whole Town ring of you if ...”

“... his face and hands with sickly-sweet toilet water and threw off his dressing-gown. Naked, he took a few steps on his points, did a little entrechat, quickly dressed, powdered his nose, and made up his eyes.’ This is the world that Vaslav Nijinsky entered as a young dancer in St Petersburg, a world, Acocella writes, ‘in which there was a heavy sexual ...”

“... then, impressed. In retrospect, it was only a matter of time before the Devil’s Arch Advocate took on Faith itself. The book he has produced is clever, subtle and well-written, in an economical summary style. This much I expected, but I also found it, despite the archness, curiously affecting, highly serious and strangely profound. You quickly ...”