“... for cancer. ‘The NHS spends a significant amount of money on health screening,’ Andrew Miller, the chair of the committee, said, ‘and it is important that this is underpinned by good scientific evidence.’ But the awkward truth is that much of the evidence is contested. The argument over breast cancer screening has been going on for ...”

“... newspaper that everyone needed to have a hobby. The Labour prospective parliamentary candidate, Paul Harvey, called for a by-election; he was ignored. By the time of his defection to the DUP, the Tories should have got used to being embarrassed by Hunter’s opinions. Iain Duncan Smith’s leadership campaign was temporarily hobbled by the Basingstoke ...”

“... bridge, ‘have no means of discovering whether or not the costs are fairly incurred. Indeed, as Miller Civil Engineering won’t tell them, they are unable to discover how much nearer they are to paying off the bridge than they were when it opened.’ As for the current obsession with privately built roads, there are two conflicting official stories. The ...”

“... jobs in Ohio, San Diego, Detroit, New York and Salt Lake City. He had also, thanks to his mentor Dr Phil Porter (‘one of homeopathy’s most pre-eminent specialists’), travelled to Berlin, Paris and London as a special correspondent for the American Homeopathic Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. There’s another red flag: never trust a 19th-century ...”

“... the ‘blink of an eye’ – that instant of conversion and spiritual rebirth when (as St Paul had promised) ‘we shall all be changed.’ But then, in 1933, Heidegger, along with a majority of Arendt’s compatriots, was transfixed by an Augenblick of diabolical consequence. Hitler’s rise to power convinced Heidegger that a rare opportunity was at ...”

“... The final section of Paul Bowles’s most famous novel, The Sheltering Sky, is prefaced by a quotation from Kafka that encapsulates the narrative trajectory of just about everything Bowles has ever written: ‘From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.’ With obsessive frequency Bowles’s short stories and novels feature characters propelled beyond the boundaries of their own cultural milieux towards realms they can neither control nor comprehend, and in which even their sufferings become meaningless ...”

“... as they are improbable. Picasso liked the mystery, was eager for no one to be sure what he would do next. Told that Joanna Drew, a curator at the Hayward Gallery, had found cocoons huddled in the slits of his Man with a Sheep, Picasso said that at Vauvenargues one day he had felt a wasps’ nest between the sheep’s legs; nothing more natural: animals ...”

“... Marilyn Monroe, about to act in Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night (1952), and Menelaus becomes Arthur Miller, ‘king of Sparta and New York’. He brings Norma Jeane back from whatever war ‘Troy’ represents in the 20th century, only to find she has evaporated, as magical figments should. The non-phantom Norma Jeane, meanwhile, saw no action of any kind since ...”

“... not turn up in some context or other, from Picasso and the Douanier Rousseau to Nancy Cunard and Paul Poiret. Brancusi’s work was the first to turn to, still is perhaps, if you wished to point to a sculpture of essences. It was (until Henry Moore) the cartoonist’s favoured notion of modern sculpture – in 1926 the New Yorker published a drawing by Helen ...”

“... are simply illustrative, and more or less equal numbers of fashion shots and celebrity portraits (do we really need Boris Johnson?). But the catalogue, the real star of the show, gives a thorough account of the magazine’s history. Condé Nast, who had bought the US version in 1909, wasn’t taking any risks by launching a British edition: American Vogue was ...”

“... and variance of the distribution are infinite. The mathematical expressions that define them do not converge to any finite value. Which archer offers the better metaphor for price changes in a financial market? The unblindfolded archer corresponds to the canonical model of price changes, which crystallised in the late 1950s: the ...”

“... that if there were any justice it should have been banned for ever from public use. PETE: Do you know, at this very moment, Her Majesty is probably exercising the royal prerogative. DUD: What’s that then, Pete? PETE: Don’t you know the royal prerogative? It’s a wonderful animal, Dud. It’s a legendary beast, half bird, half fish, half ...”

“... I am assuming,’ Paul Fussell said in Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980), ‘that travel is now impossible and that tourism is all we have left.’ To be a traveller, you have to move about alone, eschew standard procedures, avoid the commonplace of maps, and hold yourself ready for adventure ...”

“... A group portrait from January 1924 arranges photographs of the young André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst and others in a grid around a mugshot of an even more youthful Germaine Berton, an anarchist who assassinated Marius Plateau, editor of the ultra-nationalist Action française. With titles like ‘Open the Prisons, Disband the Army’, the ...”

“... which more anon). But I have neither the ambition nor the talent to be a serious chronicler de nos jours. The only time in my life I tried to do a Boswell was after an evening on which Elias Canetti had unexpectedly invited himself to supper with us alone. But when, the following morning, I looked through the notes of ...”