“... used by the protagonist of my novel, a learned former Jew from the Yemen, Ka’b al-Ahbar, who may even have been a rabbi, and is said to have accompanied the Muslim Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab when he came to and conquered Jerusalem in 638. Jewish and Christian sources tell us nothing about Ka’b. The little we know comes from Islamic literature, in which ...”

“... the glass of milk?’ Hitchcock asks, thinking of a famous moment in Suspicion where Cary Grant may or may not have poisoned Joan Fontaine’s evening drink. ‘I put a light in the milk.’ Truffaut responds: ‘You mean a spotlight on it?’ Hitchcock says: ‘No, I put a light right inside the glass because I wanted it ...”

“... familiar aspect of his work that dominates the current exhibition, Van Dyck and Britain (until 17 May). It includes about a tenth of the 400-odd portraits that emerged from his studio – around one a week – during seven and a half years of court patronage. In England a rare talent was diverted; what is more to the point, a portrait painter with an ...”

“... barons of parallel reality and fiscal mockery – Apple, Google, Amazon etc. Skinner’s bludgeon may be absent, his menu of reinforcements may be diluted but his intentions stretch from the grave. According to one of Norman Foster’s apparatchiks working on the Apple project, ‘We have a building that is pushing social ...”

“... them do struggle with the contradiction between the lure of celebrity and the sense that the cost may be too high even for people who like to pay steep prices. And those aren’t the only contradictions. The story of the discovery of a star has to have something of the fake about it when the actress playing the part is famous and long past being ...”

“... as art. Avedon, he reported, had said: ‘You know, Peter – sometimes I think that Susan may be the enemy.’Of course, Hujar’s problem with Sontag may have been that she failed to mention him in On Photography. He tended to begrudge other photographers their fame or success, even snubbing Beaton and Arbus out of ...”

“... that they were delivered to their parents slung from a beak isn’t wholly clear. The story may originate in Slavic mythology, where the stork carries unborn souls from Vyraj, a spring paradise, to earth. It’s also possible that mistaken identity is involved: in Greek myth, Hera transforms the Pygmean queen Gerana into a leggy long-beaked bird; Gerana ...”

“... at a place or a room. An image printed from a bigger piece of film holds more information: you may, for example, be able to take a magnifying glass and read titles on the spines of books which would be too far away were you standing where the camera stood. Records of rooms and buildings made before miniature cameras became commonplace can have a ...”

“... so much a case to be resolved as an analytical parade.Saint Omer opens with a sequence that may be a dream, if we attribute its imagery to Rama (Kayije Kagame), one of the film’s two leading characters. She is a writer and lecturer who takes a train to sit in on a court case that she hopes will provide material for her next novel. Or if we don’t ...”

“... diary which follows the candidate through two contests, from the summer of 2011 to the night of 6 May 2012 at the place de la Bastille where the future president of the Republic addressed an inaudible, impromptu speech to the crowd – ‘Be happy, be proud’ – and then retired for a few words with his entourage. ‘You ask yourself: will it last?’ he ...”

“... the white art establishment treated black modernism as an oxymoron, or ignored it altogether. They may not have inhabited the same Paris Noir, but they shared a sense that their work had an inescapably public dimension. The woman depicted in Delaney’s Marian Anderson knows that her every move is politically consequential. Her lips ...”

“... or literature. The last is funny: the crowd at Taboo, the club where he reigned mid-decade, may have been camp and cutting and culturally savvy, but they weren’t noted for verbal wit, save for the doorman, Marc Vautier, who would direct unlucky punters to a mirror: ‘Would you let yourself in?’‘I have always thought about/staying in and going ...”

“... at Crowe’s door. When Crowe got him to sit still long enough he couldn’t stop talking, which may or may not have had something to do with the industrial amounts of pharmaceutical cocaine he was daily ingesting. He had become almost an abstraction in the dry California air: surrounded by stubbly country-rock cowboys and ...”

“... medallists, Pisanello. Pound had seen the building for the first time some ten months earlier, in May 1922, while touring Central Italy with his wife Dorothy. It had seized his imagination, and a few weeks later he wrote the first draft of what would eventually become four cantos, his most sustained production since 1920. Returning to Paris, he had undertaken ...”

“... be forced to do it in order to maintain anything like their current standards of living. Who, you may well ask, are the Americans to tell us how to pump gas or distribute welfare? Friedman does nothing to make himself more amiable; he is the kind of journalist who likes to tell you not only that he meets the top people, but that he parades his ego before ...”