“... stayed in business ever since.Richter was born in Dresden in 1932. His early life was shaped first by the war and then by the Soviet occupation. This was the period of Brigitte Reimann’s novel Siblings (published in 1963 but only recently translated into English), when an artist’s career could ...”

“... about a molehunt in the upper echelons of what she referred to as the Fairground had her pegged by some as the heir to le Carré – one of an admittedly long list of legatees’. It’s hard not to read this throwaway remark as a glancing, self-deprecating self-portrait: in the universe that Herron has created in his Slough House series, the headquarters ...”

“... Its most recent eruption was in 1944, the latest in a series of eruptions that began in 1660. By 1737, which saw the sixth of them, it was apparent to a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Naples, who had seen the ‘inextinguishable fires’, that Vesuvius afforded ‘ample matter for reflection and writing’ and for ‘modern philosophers a ...”

“... as playful operations of chance and sudden collisions of disparate words or images, were prepared by Dada. And Breton did start out, along with fellow poets Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, in the Dadaist camp, won over by its charismatic leaders, Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia, who had converged on Paris as soon as ...”

“... depictions of violent behaviour for the reason that it unnerves and depresses me gravely to be confronted by the cruelty that human beings have a perversely inventive and unlimited capacity for. I know very well that evil exists. Some years ago I met a serial killer in fact, though he was simply a carpenter as far as ...”

“... The​ kinds of catastrophe that loom largest in today’s collective imagination tend to be compact and spectacular: the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, with a 180-decibel boom heard more than three thousand kilometres away; the tsunamis of 2011 that reared up to a height of forty metres before inundating the Japanese coast; the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, which claimed some 300,000 lives; and, most spectacular of all, the asteroid that crashed into the Yucatán Peninsula around 65 million years ago and wiped out about 75 per cent of all plant and animal life on Earth, including the dinosaurs ...”

“... the people’, and in his acerbic book The Best and the Brightest, published a decade later, David Halberstam described it as ‘a real whizbang day. There were ambushes, counter-ambushes and demonstrations in snake-meat eating, all topped off by a Buck Rogers show: a soldier with a rocket on his back who flew over ...”

“... that a person habitually says or does things that most people wouldn’t say or do. It might be that the character makes risqué jokes, or that he likes to abseil down tall buildings while wearing a pink Spider-Man costume, or that he’s actually just a pain in the arse. My intuition is that men are more likely to ...”

“... dropped on a compound on the outskirts of Baghdad where US intelligence wrongly believed him to be staying. Three years later a US airstrike succeeded in killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaida in Iraq, the organisation that would become Islamic State. Neither Saddam’s survival nor al-Zarqawi’s death had much impact on the course of ...”

“... are exploiting a tragedy to advance their anti-freedom agenda.’ Meanwhile, NRA fundraisers will be trying to reach all their five million members to let them know that this time it’s serious, the liberals are coming for their guns, and they need to dig deep and donate whatever can be spared to ‘freedom’s safest ...”

“... joined the Royal Artillery for the Second World War, before returning to school and then taking a BA and PhD at the LSE. He then taught at the University of Leicester for the rest of his (too short) life. ‘Energetic, enthusiastic, intellectually receptive, sociable, and ever on the watch for new talent,’ according to his friend and colleague Brian ...”

“... the amount of rainfall – eighteen inches in two hours – has eclipsed a hundred-year flood. If by some improbable sequence of events you manage to get the insurance adjusters to agree to it, you must build to match existing when another flood marches through a month later.I heard the phrase for the first time in Lake Charles, Louisiana, listening to an ...”

“... I n a statement​ to accompany the accession of Cut Meringues by the Museum of Modern Art following his first New York exhibition in 1962, Wayne Thiebaud suggested that each era produces its own still life. Rather than the props and evidences of discreetly arranged domesticity, he would paint edible America and its impersonal machinery of desire ...”

“... in thrall to the executive. Of every £1 raised in taxation, 91 pence is controlled and allocated by central government. The austerity programme pursued since 2010 has thrown into relief the vast power differential between central and local government: as chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne spent plenty of time talking about devolving new powers from ...”