“... to the same television studios where he held forth before the cameras in a way that would have put André Malraux to shame. Gary was probably better in the talk department than Isaiah Berlin: the Carl Lewis, one might say, of talkers. One can admire Carl Lewis as an athlete, however, without being overcome by any great desire to run against him. On the other ...”

“... feet by seven-and-a-half, it features a series of anthropomorphic figures standing amid dense green vegetation. They are long-limbed, with outsize feet and curving buttocks; parts of faces, somewhere between stylised human and totemic animal, float above their torsos; three of the figures have plump fruity breasts attached to their bodies, while two have ...”

“... that came into being in 1938 in Cairo. It was affiliated to Surrealism through contact with André Breton in Paris, and shared Surrealism’s spirit of rebellion and provocation, its desire for dream knowledge and penchant for manifestos. ‘Long live degenerate art’ was the title of its opening blast, printed in Arabic and French alongside a ...”

“... those he counted as friends (Gertrude Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre) and those he had little time for (André Gide, Jean Cocteau); there’s his wrangling with dealers and gallerists; there’s his involvement with the Communist Party, which he joined in 1944, because one ‘goes to the fountain’; there’s his wit and acid tongue; there’s his sidestepping of ...”

“... syphilis of time, played so well, on an anvil of whitewashed cement, alongside a municipal bowling green, that it became the provocation for a pedestrian expedition testing the Brexit boundaries of a timeless mead-hall England, before the fleet of plundering Papist Normans came sailing over the horizon. Just as tabloid gangs of Albanian drug-trafficking white ...”

“... after half a century, Vue de Saint-Tropez, which was taken in 1972 from the Musée Albert-André, Bagnols-sur-Cèze. Sometimes the thefts are mystifying: in 2016, seven of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup prints were lifted from a museum in Springfield, Missouri: the thieves took beef, vegetable, tomato, onion, ...”

“... is a picture in browns accented with sharp white highlights and set off by red-brown walls and a green lampshade. It is confident – the slightly wonky perspective suggests that freedom with the brush is already more important to him than the constrictions of accurate representation. At this point, his friends were hopeful; he is going to be a lively ...”

“... he saw a black and white reproduction of a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, a recent discovery of André Breton and the Surrealists. From outside the main line of medium-specific modernism, de Chirico demonstrated, for Magritte, ‘the primacy of poetry over painting’: ‘My eyes saw thought for the first time.’ Magritte’s aesthetic language of enigma ...”

“... Avenue that I used to frequent, as much because I was intrigued by the little old lady with a green parakeet on her shoulder who owned the place (she was reputed to be Whitehead’s daughter or niece), as because I was always in the market for a set of Conrad, Parkman or Scott. One day I went into the tiny shop just as she was saying to a small, pudgy and ...”

“... unusual frames for her pictures. She coloured the surround of her loge subjects with red or green pigment, harmonising the frames to the palette of her painting.’ In the catalogue, Woman in a loge is shown as it might have looked in its original green frame, which sets off the pinks and hot yellows of the painting ...”

“... up their weaker brethren. ‘Longman’ is modern shorthand for Longman, Brown, Rees, Orme and Green; Routledge for Routledge, Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner. Chatto and Windus began in the 1870s as a partnership between Andrew Chatto who had drive, and W.E. Windus, a minor poet who had some capital. But the firm only took off with the acquisition a few ...”

“... but he wasn’t. He’d been enjoying himself, my father said, laughing at the sketch involving André Previn. He had, my father said, the bonniest smile on his lips. Which was why I wanted to go and see him at the chapel of rest, as such things are called where we come from: I wanted to be able to remember that bonniest of smiles. Which goes to show how ...”

“... in the rooms taken on by Taeuber, rectilinear coloured panels in grey, black, red, blue and green. The owners, André and Paul Horn, were delighted and asked Taeuber to redo their apartment and a hotel lobby. Pleasure seekers, by contrast, stayed away. By 1930 the Aubette was neglected, and soon after it was ...”

“... who might tolerate our gaze but gives away nothing. She lies on a bed, wearing a pink camisole and green-striped pants and smoking a cigarette. Books are piled up at her feet and richly patterned fabrics – including a fashionable asiatique example – frame her like theatre curtains. With her strong hands and simple clothes, her cheeks and décolleté pink ...”

“... In 1950 André Breton published a prose poem by Octavio Paz in a surrealist anthology. He thought one line in the work was rather weak and asked Paz to remove it. Paz agreed about the line but was a little puzzled by the possibility of such a judgment on Breton’s part. He said: ‘What about automatic writing?’ Breton, unperturbed, replied that the weak line was ‘a journalistic intromission ...”