“... voice rang out: ‘You finally did it. Good on you, you old poof!’)At his subsequent wedding to David Furnish, Elton wasas happy as I could ever remember being. And that was when my mother turned up, in character as a raving sociopath … As the years passed, she had elevated sulking to an epic level. She was the Cecil B. DeMille of bad moods, the Tolstoy ...”

“... artist and has found inconsequentialities to photograph well away from Tennessee in Cuba, Russia, France, Japan and the rest of the USA. In 1976 it was the colour that set him apart. Photographers who rejected the last echoes of painting’s conventions of composition and subject matter already had a standing when Eggleston’s MoMA exhibition took place. In ...”

“... never wore the same outfit for more than a few hours. She was also a hypochondriac. Her colleague David Scherman (who took the famous picture of Miller in Hitler’s bathtub) later remembered that ‘you named a disease and Lee would imagine she had it in no time at all.’ Regina Lisso, Town Hall, Leipzig (1945) by Lee Miller. Lee Miller ...”

“... in 2003 for violating the agreement. The story gets more complicated. Since October 2003, the EU3 (France, Germany and Britain) have tried to negotiate a deal with Iran whereby it would voluntarily suspend its enrichment activities in return for regional security guarantees and help with nuclear technology. Iran was persuaded to sign the Additional ...”

“... work, called Jericho, matches towers he has erected in his 35-acre open-air studio in the South of France. Each of the storeys is a roughly three-metre cube, made from reinforced concrete casts of the corner of a freight container. A door is cut out on each side of each cube: if you step in on the ground floor you can look up, through round, bashed-out ...”

“... young man: these became Baldwin’s needs as they had been Joyce’s. What he mainly learned in France, he later said, ‘was about my own country, my own past, and about my own language. Joyce accepted silence, exile and cunning as a system which would sustain his life, and I’ve had to accept it too – incidentally, silence is the hardest part to ...”

“... two days. Then I bought and read in a similar manner – none took me any longer than two days – David Szalay’s three previous novels: London and the South-East (one of the great mocking titles, up there with Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, or Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration), The Innocent and Spring. I want to say that here is a ...”

“... their doubts about the desirability and viability of such a strategy. One of the many virtues of David Armitage’s Ideological Origins of the British Empire is that its author is markedly transatlantic in background, and consequently able to understand and mediate between these very different intellectual sensibilities and scepticisms. Trained at Princeton ...”

“... A nimation​ was invented in France, but plasticine was invented in Britain. In 1892, Charles-Émile Reynaud showed his Théâtre Optique for the first time in Paris: hundreds of hand-drawn images on gelatin, each depicting the next phase of a story. Attached to a reel and passed in front of a magic lantern, the images projected movement onto a screen ...”

“... to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly that it is in the nature of an interim verdict since the official records of the 1950s, including the Suez crisis, are closed under the Thirty Year ...”

“... on the patronage of television. In contrast, in the other major centres of production – France, the United States and Australia – anthropological film-making has been primarily supported by academic institutions or government agencies. By a provocative coincidence, both the origins of modern anthropology and the birth of cinema can be traced to ...”

“... my meetings and conversations with her. What we talked about: art, books, the literary world, France, friends in common. What we didn’t talk about: her early years, her personal life, politics (I never knew whether or how she voted), or anything practical. No exchange of recipes. No mention of sport. ‘Anita, what do you think of Ireland’s chances in ...”

“... has a telos: the fulfilment of the prophecy that the Messiah would be a descendant of the House of David. This precludes the pyrotechnic genealogical loops of the pagan gods, but it also illustrates the problem of genealogy more generally. Where to start and who to include? The Gospel of Luke takes the lineal patriarchal story back to Adam, which makes us all ...”

“... Fashion modelling and high society swiftly ensued. The only thing she had done before was to go to France right after leaving school, chaperoned by her French teacher; but she soon ditched Mademoiselle to remain alone in Paris. With her parents’ permission and financial support, she stayed on to learn the rudiments of stage design and lighting, along with ...”

“... as A Man’s Place by Tanya Leslie in 1992, won Ernaux the Prix Renaudot and a large readership in France, but, more important, it allowed her to begin feeling out her territory. She had in mind a book she felt she couldn’t write, that was perhaps impossible to write, a book that would tell the story of France itself since ...”