“... his anus is reproduced in evidence) to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, to the way the exposé of Paul deMan’s early anti-Semitic writings has been used to discredit his literary criticism. These examples sprout sub-examples, often weirdly illustrated with helpful photographs. To bolster the uncontroversial claim ...”

“... and is fond of dressing up in other people’s personalities. After the Almighty, after St Paul – for whom he confesses ‘a strange liking’ – his most influential model, or imaginative icon, is John Bunyan, whose life and work obsess him. Bunyan is ‘this dreamer and penman’, ‘the most prominent man of ...”

“... right objective scenario for the point to be made. As an artist he had negative capability. As a man he was rather ordinary: that is to say, he had a warm heart, was kind, dutiful, devoted and vulnerable, often a trifle absurd, never in the least diabolic, good rather than bad. He was emphatically not, as Tolstoy certainly was, in the ...”

“... Julian Bell informed his mother Vanessa that the war in which he was serving as an ambulance man was ‘perpetually entertaining and very satisfactory’, one of the chief pleasures being ‘getting back into male society’. John Cornford fought in Spain as a zealous young Communist, but his letters to Margot Heinemann reflect the same ...”

“... with a tug at the heartstrings that drew audiences worldwide into the ebb and flow of the Little Man’s campaign against oppression and neglect. Jacques Tati as Monsieur Hulot in ‘Les Vacances de M. Hulot’ (1953). In the decades after the Second World War, another supremely accomplished mime artist with a lively ...”

“... Anna Karina have about them the personal, spontaneous quality of a home movie. Following A bout de souffle (1960), his first film and one whose success with the public he has never repeated, Godard cast Karina as the female lead in Le Petit Soldat (1960; banned by the French government for its political content and not released until after the Algerian war ...”

“... it is a daunting bibliography, and no obvious starting-point presents itself, other than the man himself. In Two Sisters, his ‘novel as memoir, memoir as novel’, the narrator, V., an idealised Vidal, says: ‘In a sense, the only purpose of life is the creation of a self and what matters is the sum total of all one’s attempts.’ There have been ...”

“... Soyez mysterieuses,’ Paul Gauguin had carved into the lintel of his last residence in the South Seas, the ‘House of Pleasure’, or ‘House of Orgasm’, as some would translate Maison du Jouir. ‘I am not a painter who copies nature – today less than before. With me everything happens in my crazy imagination ...”

“... irrational act seem rational’). ‘The last 18 years like a bad Dostoevsky novel,’ he wrote to Paul Elmer More in June 1933, on the cusp of his separation from Vivien. In an essay of 1924 he remarked that Dostoevsky’s characters are aware of ‘the grotesque futility of their visible lives, and seem always to be listening for other voices’, which ...”

“... fenced with barbed-wire, all its trams, even all its sports facilities, had then belonged to the De Beers Consolidated Mines, which had belonged to him; sometimes the same seemed to be true of its heat, its sand, its tin-roofed houses. The convent school, three blocks away from my house, had been the hotel in which he had lived while Kimberley was ...”

“... design, nor of its ‘ripe tone’, and she even regrets its limited practicality. Her suitor, a man of some education, is doubtless gratified by the evidence of the conscientious and continuous domestic servitude to which its high polish testifies. But he would not have sublimated this gratification into an aesthetic preference and, although he likens Anna ...”

“... on as a live-in secretary’, during a brief experiment with tantouserie, and Louis de Gonzague Frick, ‘the parody of a fin-de-siècle aesthete’, not to mention the host of dealers and collectors, like Alfred Flechtheim of Düsseldorf, an intrepid Picassophile, who exhibited ‘a preference for policemen ...”

“... chapter here on Gustave Lanson (a chapter very well done, by Antoine Compagnon), whose Histoire de la Littérature Française, first published in 1895, is in its stiff-necked way the most commanding volume of the sort to have been written in France. Lanson also planned, but never wrote, another, less professorial History, which would be the ‘portrait of ...”

“... had always been, he now sought to secure his hold on power yet again by presenting himself as the man who could bring peace to the Middle East. But the countries he reached agreements with – the UAE, Morocco, Sudan, Bahrain – had little interest in Israeli-Palestinian relations. One thing they had in common was that they were all customers of Israeli ...”

“... had more impact had it been published at the time it was written. The assessments of, for example, Paul Wolfowitz – identified by Greenstock as a key influence on the decision to go to war – and the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, would have attracted more comment when these figures were more ...”