“... Kanfer shrugs off one of the darkest and most disturbing episodes in American history. He cites Richard Brooks’s suggestion that ‘Bogie was never the same again’ after his renunciation of the First Amendment Committee, and says: ‘This smacks of the kind of romantic wish-dream that stayed with the Old Left for decades, crystallised in a film called ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and local governments to stop scapegoating public sector workers for problems that originated on Wall Street. The economy started going wrong in the 1970s – Tom Wolfe’s ‘me decade’. Frivolous and self-regarding, the 1970s were also profoundly grim. It was in this decade that the American (and global) economy embarked on its fateful transformation ...”

“... by juxtaposition with the unfamiliar (to me), and the sequence presented with the minimum of wall-label stage direction. MoMA in New York has lent the show its necessary still centre, the terrible grey room entitled 18 October 1977, which approaches (any verb here will be too weak and too strong) the evidence left behind from the deaths and destruction ...”

“... on US tutelage like the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen. On 31 January he told the Wall Street Journal that ‘Syria is stable. Why? Because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue. When there is divergence … you will have this vacuum that creates disturbance.’ Assad and his allies in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sees it – was a precocious expression of a new city vernacular of exposed frame and curtain wall. Lever House is one of a string of examples, from Vauban’s fortifications at Lille to London’s Millennium Bridge, that Saint discusses. These exemplary buildings are on the whole familiar, many of them landmarks: taller, wider or more original or refined ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... It’s hardly surprising that Sandy Arbuthnot falls for this sex goddess of espionage; even Richard Hannay is tempted: ‘I hated her instinctively, hated her intensely, but longed to arouse her interest.’ The idea of the vamp extracting secrets from hapless men is old, but took on a ” new life during the First World War, when spy fever raged. Tammy ...”

“... burgher would think about an 18th-century borough. ‘The inhabitants tell him that beyond the wall there is a power which taxes them at pleasure, without their consent . . . He learns that the affairs of the borough are not decided in the borough; but that a man belonging to the king, an intendant, administers them, alone and at a ...”

“... freedom of movement was such an issue in the Brexit referendum, and why Trump’s call to build a wall along the Mexican border is intelligible to so many. It is perhaps only in this context that the otherwise bizarre phenomenon of ‘birtherism’ makes sense. In a world where geographical location is the best predictor of economic outcomes, being indigenous ...”

“... The Leopard). These are faces that want to be seen. Caravaggio’s Bacchus is tacked to the wall behind a portrait of a woman staring into a bowl of grapes. Her body language echoes that of the god looking over her; her expression is a version of Bacchus’s but not quite a repetition. Goldin’s art-historical (and pop-cultural) doubles appear like ...”

“... called The Mirror in Europe, Particularly in France. There are passing references to Shakespeare (Richard II’s famous mirror soliloquy) and there’s an excellent extended analysis of a passage in Rilke, as well as scattered references to other European writers; and many of the paintings are German or Dutch. But most of the literary sources are French, and ...”

“... they got.’ On 1 May 2003, I heard that 140 American soldiers had died in combat in Iraq. I heard Richard Perle tell Americans to ‘relax and celebrate victory’. I heard him say: ‘The predictions of those who opposed this war can be discarded like spent cartridges.’ I heard Lieutenant-General Jay Garner say: ‘We ought to look in a mirror and get ...”

“... and some cracks in the emulsion.’ The only image made by any of the family that hung on a wall in the Nemerov house was a bad painting by Alexander’s grandfather, done in his retirement. He also remembers his mother, Peggy, noting that when his father came home after accompanying his sister on one of her photographic shoots in New York, ‘perhaps ...”