“... In Los Angeles, his classes attracted Oscar Levant, the film composer Alfred Newman and John Cage. Schoenberg lamented his students’ ignorance but was happy teaching non-musicians. (One of his students was Jackie Robinson, who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball.) Schoenberg was far from lonely or in the ...”

“... collective movements clean when they performed at the Barbican last month.* Whereas in the work of John Cage, whose music often accompanied Cunningham’s dances, randomness seemed a rediscovery of the sounds found in ‘nature’, most notably in the sounds of the quiet concert hall with which he filled 4l33ll, there was nothing natural about ...”

“... from time to time exhibit selected Screen Tests. The idea was already in the air. The neo-dadaist, John Cage-influenced Fluxus artists were already making similar perversely conceptual films. At least a year before Warhol began documenting faces for The 13 Most Beautiful Boys, the Icelandic political pop artist Erró, then based in New York, was at work ...”

“... its long depressive state – into something beautiful as opposed to correct or clever. John Cage, for some of us, is an even lesser god than Duchamp, but in the final room at Tate, where a suite of big abstracts done under Cage’s auspices is hung, it does not matter. The imperfect lusciousness of the ...”

“... pointing out details, the texture in the broad masses. And the ancient lift creaks up to its cage at the top of the building, a cage the wind visits and ...”

“... Byzantine frontality, is to be characterised by a phrase, I would single out a remark made by John Cage as he went round the exhibition, that he was struck by ‘the absence of tranquillity in a centred composition’. The late paintings seem to me to be divisible into three phases of unequal length – a head, a body and a short tail. The first ...”

“... philosopher. All the children are very musical, like their mother, and all of them are, as John Cage said of Schoenberg, self-made aristocrats. Waugh sometimes gives the impression that had it not been for all the suicides, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the two world wars and the rise of Fascism in Germany, the Wittgensteins would ...”

“... who worked with him briefly, and in whom he had no interest (and of whom he had no memory), was John Cage. Goldfinger claimed to be a lifelong Marxist, but he never joined the Communist Party. In 1931, he met Ursula Blackwell, a woman of enormous resilience and wit who was then studying painting with Amédée Ozenfant. They married in 1933 and moved ...”

“... Their artistic and romantic partnership would last until 1961; the company they kept included John Cage and Merce Cunningham. In this heady atmosphere, Johns chose, in autumn 1954, to destroy all his prior work, and to begin the paintings that made his name when they were shown four years later: flags, targets and numbers crafted in encaustic ...”

“... close of World War II. He attended Harvard, where he began a close friendship with his classmate, John Ashbery. After a year (1950-51) in Michigan writing and translating poetry, he moved to New York, where he rejoined his Harvard friends and their friends – among them the poets Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest – becoming part of a social ...”

“... to be true. Consider the following. I went on a date with a classical composer who invited me to a John Cage concert at Juilliard. After the concert we looked for the bust of Béla Bartók on 57th Street. We couldn’t find it, but he told me how Bartók had died there of leukaemia. I wanted to like this man, who was excellent on paper, but I didn’t. I ...”

“... people, even if this meant ceaseless tensions and a permanent identity crisis. In 2001, when John Howard’s Liberal government was returned to power with an increased majority, it found the post-9/11 climate wholly sympathetic to its belief that further doses of nationalist purgative were required, in order to allay the strains of a still novel ...”

“... sight of fertile land, making generalisations about peasant life difficult. Buñuel’s biographer John Baxter writes about Las Hurdes: ‘The lowlands, Las Hurdes Bajas, were lush and prosperous, but the flinty uplands behind them, Las Hurdes Altas, were among the most deprived areas in Spain. The peasants … lived in medieval conditions, ravaged by ...”

“... 2001 film version of Louis de Bernières’s novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a miscast Nicolas Cage plays the soldier hero. The opening scene depicts the (second) Italian invasion of Greece in 1941. Mussolini’s first invasion, in 1940, had been a political and military disaster, the first sign that Italian fascism’s ambitious war aims were unlikely to ...”

“... could order the fragments in her own way; but even this seems rather too programmatic, a bit too John Cage. It is certainly better to dip into the book than to read it through – one of the many endearing things about Pessoa is that he makes conscientiousness seem silly – and the fragments should be read as a series of bulletins, without assuming one ...”