“... zebra on a wooden plinth. Like something out of place and menacing, sticking its head through the wall in an early Lucian Freud painting. The questing sociologist has an agenda. She is our nominated surrogate in occupied territory. And she is persistent. She comes back until the required witnesses can be persuaded to share a drink and a stroll, to confess in ...”

“... Middle East, reforming the criminal justice system, overseeing the building of the Mexican border wall, diplomacy with China, the 2020 re-election campaign and the creation of an Office of American Innovation dedicated to entirely revamping the way the government works. His efforts at procurement have been disastrous, and there is a continuing nationwide ...”

“... German-Jewish parlour from between the wars. Visitors can look in through the cut-away wall and see shelves of books, a piano, reproductions of high art. A sign explains that German Jews thought that they could become part of the dominant culture by embracing the ideals of Bildung – a belief formed by engagement with art, philosophy and learning ...”

“... Republic have perpetuated the iniquities of totalitarianism. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the migration of 200,000 working people to the West amount to a popular uprising. They show that doctrinaire Marxism is the last obstacle on Germany’s road to democracy. An American scholar, Charles Maier of Harvard, has followed the ...”

“... the pale of Christianity; that, thought to the end, his true design was once for all to wreck the wall of fixed causes with their dogmas and institutional arrangements for the sake of that ultimat unity which the causes mean and thwart. ‘Erasmus’ by Siegfried Kracauer, in Ernst Bloch zu Ehren Marx and Nietzsche are the last German philosophers to have ...”

“... Fonda: John Kerry with Tits’. Phyllis Schlafly and Tom Wolfe have both described the memorial wall as a ‘monument to Jane Fonda’. A set of urban legends has sprung up around her visit to Hanoi in the summer of 1972: a prisoner of war, ordered by his captors to describe his ‘lenient and humane’ treatment to the visiting actress, spat on her instead ...”

“... governments on corrupt and unrentable schemes: if the lira means the Mafia and Andreotti then, in Richard Nixon’s famous outburst of 1974, Fuck the lira! Accident alla lira! Meanwhile, a country excluded from monetary union – and this is the truly diabolical feature of the euro – will be forced by the capital markets to pay higher rates of interest, run ...”

“... their character and dynamism, not the LEAs. All sponsors have a corporate view of schools, even if Richard Tice, chair of governors in one of the first academies, Northampton Academy, is unusual in the frankness with which he espouses the corporate model: the school as a business and the head as a CEO. All put tremendous emphasis on leadership and the ...”

“... the English period too. But it all hinges on Linson’s daybed. The daybed was along a windowless wall covered with drawings, prints, oil sketches and a wooden artist’s palette. The room was full of late Victorian clutter: an end table holding a large kerosene lamp, on the floor a tall square ceramic vase stuffed tight with a cluster of brushes, a stout ...”

“... with dusters. I don’t mean I want to play Burt Reynolds parts, only somewhere between him and Richard Wattis, say – those are the parameters.’She was a great woman, her performance of ‘Let’s Do It’ at the Albert Hall the stuff of legend. I just hope Noël Coward was still around to see it. I first met her, almost epically, in Sainsbury’s in ...”

“... The US scarcely paid attention, but continued to support Pakistan. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the implosion of the USSR in 1991, the US lost virtually all interest in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar was never as good as the CIA thought he was, and with the creation in 1994 of the Taliban, both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia transferred their secret ...”

“... to and from camera. He submitted the photographs from this session to a masterclass run by Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel. One of Avedon’s biographers suggests that this may have been a ‘mating ritual’, since Hujar was Avedon’s type. But then Avedon’s work of the 1940s and 1950s was one of Hujar’s most important influences. Either way, he ...”

“... for a single-artist auction, set by Picasso with 88 works in 1993. During those same two days Wall Street melted down. Over the previous weekend Merrill Lynch was bought in a fire sale by Bank of America and Lehman Brothers vanished into thin air, both victims of the metastatic crisis in mortgage securities. The Dow Jones plunged five hundred points on 15 ...”

“... a long battle between Tower Hamlets Council and the Smithsons’ admirers, who include Hadid and Richard Rogers, the estate is currently being demolished. Alison Smithson died in 1993. Her husband survived her, but she had always been the dominant partner and much of the cult status the Smithsons now enjoy is owed to her. With her dark matryoshka doll ...”

“... Jim Jarmusch’s girlfriend, and as a receptionist for Larry Gagosian’s gallery, where she met Richard Prince. These were the Basquiat 1980s, when before he made it big Julian Schnabel worked as a cook at Mickey’s, where Jeff Koons hung out. She admired female artists who were critiquing the commodification of art, like Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and ...”