“... in the neck. Imagine what it’s like for the writer. Or for Marlon.William Mann does not have the field to himself. There are at least a dozen biographies of Brando, or memoirs that depend on his presence. The weightiest of these is Peter Manso’s, published in 1994, when Brando still had ten years to live. (Mann hurries through those last years out of ...”

“... few trips to New York, including momentous visits to the Museum of Modern Art, where he catches a Frank Stella retrospective, and the Guggenheim Museum, where he sees a Moholy-Nagy exhibition. On his return to France, Bois gives up his own artmaking, and after a tedious course in Pau he decides against art history too. The siren call now comes from critical ...”

“... of Surrealism for feminist art and theory, which took up the question of ‘sexuality in the field of vision’ in the 1980s (as Jacqueline Rose referred to it then). In any case, today the women of Surrealism are esteemed as much as the men, if not more. Meret Oppenheim received a major retrospective last year, and women Surrealists featured prominently ...”

“... In June​ 1944, Field Marshal Rommel, widely regarded as Hitler’s most capable military leader, got caught out. Ever since his arrival in France, the Desert Fox had worried about the physical and mental preparedness of his troops. Like other senior military figures, he had criticised the luxurious lifestyle of German officers in Paris: their Etappengeist, the ‘spirit of the rear lines’, was in contrast to the Kampfgeist, or ‘fighting spirit’, of those dying at the front ...”

“... out that court records show the working classes were just as up for it. Douglas Plummer, in his frank book Queer People (1963), insisted that ‘for every Hugh Walpole there are many thousands of ordinary labourers or lorry drivers or salesmen who are also homosexual.’ It’s a world where Walpole is still a touchstone, of class, artistic status and, 22 ...”

“... The two correspondents should have interests in common and should be able to be brutally frank.’ One of his earliest modifications to his epistolary contract with Hale was to suggest that ‘now that there is more communication between us, I feel that I must be frank.’ Spontaneity was a contact sport, and ...”

“... season when the Sabbath came in early, my school was instructed that I had to leave the football field at 3.30. There were plenty of other Jewish boys there – the school was in Brondesbury – but I was the one who bore the brand. Was my father even aware of what a sissy I was constantly being made to look by his beliefs? If he had been, would it have made ...”

“... by his preliminary sketches, some of them so rough and full of energy they’re reminiscent of Frank Auerbach, though none of this dash survives into the finished portraits. Occasionally funny, too, particularly a sketch of Two Lovers Startled by a Young Person, a child gazing at a snogging couple.22 March. Good example of journalistic spite last week ...”

“... experience it as strangely empty. Even on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, a British field artillery officer looking towards the German trenches could see ‘not a single soldier ... not a movement of any sort’. A British parachutist in combat in 1982 reported: ‘I didn’t really see any Argies properly until they’d started surrendering ...”

“... IV. One of them shows Johann Baptist Eichelsdörfer, the camp commandant, standing amid a field of dead inmates with an odd expression on his face – irritated or peeved. Were Salinger and Fitzgerald there that day? Did they see Eichelsdörfer? We don’t know. But whatever Salinger saw would have helped him to imagine what had happened to the girl ...”

“... stayed back, accidentally, to admire this spectacle. The rugger tryouts had taken the trouble, on-field, during the scrum, to wrestle and hug the earth completely, and by the end of it, to return with an unfaultable cosmetic exterior of dirt, sweat, and plastered hair. Not an inch of clean skin, and on their bodies, uncreased cotton, was to be seen, and, on ...”

“... these terrestrial commitments. In her accompanying letter the comically obtuse Ethel struggled to field Harris’s demands for information about her brother’s intellectual development (‘I wouldn’t have thought Ern was interested in architecture and art as you say,’) but did at least reveal that he was ‘a great reader’ and ‘often used to go to ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... the very top of the pile. Frick had been a senior Bavarian administrator, Ley came from IG Farben, Frank and Goebbels had good university records and ‘would have succeeded in any field or calling’. Hess, Kater notes, would probably have become a professor in Munich, although the author’s earlier remarks about Bavaria ...”

“... German critics; they concentrate rather selectively on minor and largely non-dramatic works. As Frank Trommler says in a sceptical Afterword (to my mind, the most perceptive part of the book), these essays show ‘to what a large degree his work is used as a vehicle for contemporary concerns, to what extent he is cast as a guru for artistic ...”