“... Shockers in their own day, Owen, Blunden and the rest were canonical, now. It is to them that Barbara looks, in Put out more flags, when she wants a model for what she imagines will be the wartime role of her feckless brother Basil Seal: ‘She thought of him in terms of the war books she had read. She saw him as Siegfried Sassoon, an infantry subaltern ...”

“... days and nights of a scene that flickered for a few years and then burned out. In his memoir Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Larry McMurtry writes: ‘There circulated, in the Sixties, the legend that Thomas Pynchon read only the Encyclopaedia Britannica; it was even said that much of the erudition in V. came out of the N-O volume of that great ...”

“... like irresponsible, grown-up cousins’ than parents. After the birth of their daughter Barbara in 1912, Ray returned to suffrage work, tired of ‘rent, chimney sweepings, washing curtains, wages, repairs etc’.This was a significant moment for the suffrage movement. The schism was deepening between the National Union of Women’s Suffrage ...”

“... Painting and Sculpture’ that brought their English contemporaries – Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ivon Hitchens – into a common fold with Kandinsky, Miró, Calder and Arp, all then working in Paris. At roughly the same moment two or three shows of abstract art opened in London galleries. The press, to whom the phenomenon was new, greeted ...”

“... love letter to an art scene that was centred around bikes, beer and bravado. In 1957, Kienholz and Walter Hopps opened the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard, with a line-up of largely unknown young male artists they called ‘the studs’. As Chicago later put it, ‘no women artists were taken seriously. The men sat around Barney’s and talked about ...”

“... screeds of banter. The letters, even those to his closest friends, Chappell, a ballet dancer, and Barbara Ker-Seymer, a photographer and launderette owner, rarely confide beyond being rude about third parties. Sex? Forget it. If he was to be believed, it took screen goddess Mae West to get him going to the extent of achieving an erection and that, he ...”

“... the new Black Studies programme, where the visiting speakers included Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney and James and Grace Lee Boggs.Cruse had been recruited in response to increasing discontent among Black students at the university. The publication of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual in 1967 had turned him into a campus ...”

“... to buy a picture so that he could pay that year’s rent in advance. A group of artists including Walter Gropius, Hans Arp and László Moholy-Nagy organised a charitable raffle. One of the myths about Mondrian is that he was a recluse, uninterested in any scene. In fact, though he squirrelled himself away during working hours (there was no casual showing up ...”

“... So were three of his children: Erika (also just most of the time; she made an exception for Bruno Walter, among others), Klaus and Golo. Suicide was a family theme too. Both of Thomas Mann’s sisters committed suicide, as did his sons Klaus and Michael, as did the second wife of his brother Heinrich. Also, gerontophilia. Bruno ...”

“... family as Cromwell’s Chief Justice, Oliver St John, whose daughter married Apsley’s cousin Sir Walter St John, denounced by his Royalist opponents as ‘rogue, anabaptist and a quaker’. In becoming a royal servant Apsley followed his father’s calling; his sister Lucy clung fast to the Parliamentarian loyalties of the St Johns. Her husband, John ...”

“... held on 13 April 1992 at the ANC headquarters in Johannesburg. He sat in front of us, flanked by Walter Sisulu, his political godfather, and Oliver Tambo, who had been his partner in the law firm they set up in the 1950s and was the ANC’s longstanding president in exile. His delivery, always monotone, was flatter than usual as he read a short statement ...”

“... Fifty years ago, Barbara Tuchman’s bestseller The Guns of August taught a generation of Americans about the origins of the First World War: the war, she wrote, was unnecessary, meaningless and stupid, begun by overwhelmed, misguided and occasionally mendacious statesmen and diplomats who stumbled into a catastrophe whose horrors they couldn’t begin to imagine – ‘home before the leaves fall,’ they thought ...”

“... assistance from London. Along with his parliamentary colleagues Leslie Hale, Arthur Creech Jones, Barbara Castle and Aneurin Bevan, Brockway consistently raised the crisis in Kenya in the Commons, earning himself the nickname ‘the Member for Africa’. In 1962 he presented a petition to Parliament ‘on behalf of 158,642 citizens of the Protectorate and ...”

“... this: Mr Shepherd, a civil, cautious lawyer, who, whatever might be his hold or his views on Sir Walter, would rather have the disagreeable prompted by any body else, excused himself from offering the slightest hint, and only begged leave to recommend an implicit deference to the excellent judgment of Lady Russell, – from whose known good sense he fully ...”

“... to set the record straight about ‘the diva myth that has followed me all my life’.She was born Barbara Joan Streisand in 1942 in Brooklyn. Her mother, Diana Rosen, was a gifted singer; Streisand never shook the feeling that her mother was jealous of her. When she was fifteen months old her father, Emanuel, died of a seizure at a summer camp in the ...”