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“... 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 ...”

“... is visible in the dust of controversy, it is the need for a painstaking and precise explication de texte. Without a detailed map of the terrain, the quest for Rabelais’s real meaning is bound to go astray. Even if there is no ‘real’ meaning below the surface, a text as allusively comic and comically allusive as that of Rabelais is bound to be in need ...”

“... Pissarro​ , Camille Pissarro’s eldest son, was barely into his teens in the mid 1870s when Paul Cézanne came to live nearby. Nonetheless he retained strong memories of the time, and many years later his brother Paul-Émile wrote down these sentences at Lucien’s dictation:Cézanne lived in Auvers, and he used to ...”

“... Luc Tuymans’s ‘The Walk’ (1993). It was easier than he expected for this aloof, offhand man to escape the scaffold at his trial by dissociating himself from the milieu at whose centre he had been for more than a decade while smoothly inculpating his fellow denizens. There was nothing about his mien which suggested fanaticism or a capacity for ...”

“... the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, in a painting from 1917, surrounded by images of their son, Paul, from the 1920s. On the opposite wall, three works hung together testify to the journey the brooding young man in the self-portrait made in the ensuing three decades. Tate’s Girl in a Chemise from 1905, so familiar ...”

“... simple, namely causing the death of another person. This is murder as one of the fine arts, as De Quincey called it, and here as in the films of Alfred Hitchcock it can only mean an unholy conspiracy between the criminals and the moviemakers, especially the writers, in this case Clouzot and three others. Only an artist, in life or in the cinema, could be ...”

“... spot where Hammershøi painted from his rooms above 67 Great Russell Street. Today it’s Celia Paul who has a studio opposite the museum: ‘When I lie in bed, I am eye-level with the frieze above the door.’ She paints its façade shrouded in blackest brown and electric yellow, a dark imposing monolith from the days of gaslight, dripping with sulphurous ...”

“... claim that ‘what is at stake in writing is the very structure of authority itself’; Paul Bové patiently, clearly, usefully, explicates Foucault’s employment of the terms ‘discourse’ and ‘genealogy’; Annabel Patterson no less helpfully provides a history of the Intention controversies from Beardsley and Wimsatt on, showing how, since ...”

“... fault (real ale, CND, the Goons) while the Mods had a magpie eye for European style, from the Tour de France to the Nouvelle Vague. Trads followed Acker Bilk, Mods worshipped Thelonious Monk: even at fifty years’ remove, you can see how sharing the same club, city or country might have been problematic. If the Oxbridgey Trads had a philosophical pin-up it ...”

“... could sound quite as adulatory about the figure of ‘the Artist’ as Shelley: ‘The moment a man feels or realises himself as an artist, he ceases to belong to any milieu or time,’ he announced in the ‘Manifesto’ to his short-lived periodical, Blast. But more generally, like most of his modernist contemporaries, he set himself noisily against ...”

“... along with the wonderful Schreber.’ Freud is here referring to the famous case of Daniel Paul Schreber, whose Memoirs of his nervous illness had appeared in 1903, and constitute one of the most celebrated case-studies of paranoia in the literature. The letter of 1910 to Jung goes on: ‘Schreber, who ought to have been made a professor of psychiatry ...”

“... wood was stored; Maurice Duplay, who owned the house, was a master-carpenter. In this courtyard, Paul Barras saw two generals of the Republic picking over the salad herbs for dinner, under the eye of Madame Duplay. Robespierre lived on the first floor, in a low-ceilinged room with the plainest of furnishings.The historian François Furet tells us: ‘The ...”

“... Wieland was hired as tutor to the crown prince, the classic occupation of the late 18th-century man of letters. Goethe arrived three years later, fresh from the Europe-wide success of The Sorrows of Young Werther. He recommended another polymath, Johann Gottfried Herder, who arrived in 1776 and became general superintendent of churches, also overseeing ...”

“... on how this observation applied to his own career, and whether he was a one or a two-book man himself. In 1958, a Cambridge don called Frederick J. Stopp produced a study of Waugh – uniquely, Waugh himself gave ‘generous assistance’ – which warmly endorsed the idea that he had basically ‘two books in his armoury’, the first featuring the ...”

“... War, Cécile Sauvage, Messiaen’s mother, threw herself into an affair with her editor, Jean de Gourmont, leaving Olivier and his younger brother, Alain, to be raised by their maternal grandmother. After de Gourmont left her for another woman, Cécile retreated to a room that, in Pierre’s words, ‘was never ...”