“... with her grandmother, Picasso offered something she recognised.Gilot moved in with Picasso in May 1946. Soon after they left to spend the summer at Maar’s house in Ménerbes. Gilot had protested – it ‘seemed a strange thing to be doing’ and unpleasant for all involved – but Picasso reasoned that he had bought the house for Maar and so should ...”

“... checked by the executive, as that is again by the legislative; all parts moving, and however they may follow the particular interests of their body, yet all uniting at last for the public good.’ No sign here of the tyrant denounced by Thomas Jefferson in the more vituperative passages of the Declaration of Independence. All this goes to support Roberts’s ...”

“... possessed almost equally of integrity and mendaciousness. In her desire for social acceptance, she may have exaggerated the gentility of her origins, while the accounts of her conversations with tribesmen, or the way she scores off local bores or bullies, a sharp-tongued Emma speaking perfect Arabic, smacks more than a little of l’esprit d’escalier. But ...”

“... Marcus wrote in 1975. Gradually, the image morphed into something more modern: ‘Robert Johnson may be the first ever rock star,’ the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame said when it inducted him in 1986, the year it opened. Wald was especially good at articulating Johnson’s appeal without resorting to superstition or stereotypes:For his original fans, he was a ...”

“... and drunkenness are unlikely to be tolerated (how they will be policed is another matter). Beer may be the drug of choice at men’s football matches in Europe and Latin America, but having experienced the collective euphoria of watching England’s women winning the European Championships at Wembley this summer without encountering a single drunk or ...”

“... will never allow foreign bureaucrats to trample on your Second Amendment freedoms.’ The Donald may be no Adolf, but he sings the same Song of the Will. After the worst of wars, there has to be a winding down, a settlement of outstanding grievances, insisted on, whether brutally or charitably, by the victors, and resisted or grudgingly accepted by the ...”

“... or work around selective availability, and make their products more accurate in spite of it. In May 2000 the military stopped degrading the civilian GPS signal. Sales of GPS receivers soared. It isn’t just every phone and every Uber car that’s now fitted with GPS; in some parts of the world it’s every tractor too. And not because farmers need to be ...”

“... a decade before but had since abandoned. The LCS was never very large: at its most successful, it may never have contained more than three thousand active, paid-up members, though many more thousands must have attended a few meetings, even joined it briefly, then hurriedly left or slowly drifted away. In bad times its membership dwindled away to a few ...”

“... forces on the weaker, rather than stronger, link of the Axis first. It is not because Pyongyang may, or may not, have a few rudimentary nuclear weapons, which we could easily take out, but because it can shatter Seoul in a conventional attack that we have to proceed more cautiously in bringing it down. But do you ...”

“... other ways in which Cubism’s voyage might have ended. Braque was posted missing on the Somme in May 1915; when found, he was blind. What if this condition had been permanent? What if the hand of the surgeon who trepanned him had slipped? What if, like his fellow trepanee Apollinaire, he had survived the operation only to be carried off by the great ...”

“... are not good things to be. Again, the key is Tolstoy (and Shakespeare). Power and sincerity may be concepts which most criticism and many hundreds of writers have venerated, yet as far as Bayley is concerned, Tolstoy’s easy epic power reveals how unnaturally most writers employ them: ‘powerful’ and ‘sincere’ work is likely to be willed ...”

“... fought and wrote his major poems, were a small proportion of the British Army as a whole, and it may be that their early deployment in 1940 immunised them against a general political infection. I doubt this, however: not even Spike Milligan reads like that. When British forces in Cairo held a mock election under the auspices of the Army Educational Command ...”

“... with firm, frontally presented bodies or with devices that enhance its given texture. Thus stone may, in his metaphors, ‘disclose itself’ or ‘grow steadfastly’, emerging into ‘stone-blossom’. The ideal carver merely helps the stone to unfurl. Taken as prompts to interest English readers in distant Italian reliefs, these marine and vegetable ...”

“... Peggy’s marriage to an unemployed academic: Brown also arranges for a timely inheritance.) Dane may be an expert in psychology, but about the girl he intends to marry he says things like: ‘It’s as if everybody, the world and the flesh and the Whole Family, had been blundering round and setting their feet down as near as they could to a flower. But the ...”

“... Louise Bourgeois​ died, aged 98, in May 2010. Shortly before her death Jerry Gorovoy, her long-time assistant, found a forgotten box of her jottings, unpublished papers and diaries from her time in psychoanalysis. He had uncovered a similar stash six years earlier; together, the materials came to a thousand pages of notes ...”