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“... appearance today is in keeping with a longer history of manipulation. After visiting the studio, Man Ray reported that he was ‘more impressed than in any cathedral. I was overwhelmed by its whiteness and lightness … [It] was like entering another world.’ Brancusi did everything he could to maintain this atmosphere, dressing all in white, sporting ...”

“... Ray Strachey​ is remembered, if at all, for The Cause, her history of the women’s movement, published in 1928. But reading that book – which is dedicated to Strachey’s friend and mentor Millicent Garrett Fawcett – you wouldn’t know that its writer played a major role in the events described at the end, when an ‘almost religious fervour … sent young ladies to street corners to demand the vote’, and to pledge ‘their whole lives to the Cause ...”

“... more to place than to family. ‘I feel as if I were going to get married – to the right man at last,’ she joked to a friend in anticipation of the move to Hyères in 1922. Though her marriage endured for 28 years, she and Teddy seem to have had scarcely anything in common apart from a zest for travel, a love of motor cars and a fondness for little ...”

“... newly arrived in the British Museum. What he saw there made him exclaim that he was the first man to read these words for two thousand years. Then he started rushing around the room, removing his clothes. Shortly afterwards, he read a paper about his discoveries before the Society of Biblical Archaeology. Gladstone was in the audience – the only ...”

“... to shell-shocked soldiers during the First World War, and a recurring trope in his writing is a ‘man cut in two by the window’, the very figure of a divided subject. Max Ernst, the most traumatophilic of Surrealists, read Freud in the original German and related the layering of his early collages to the working over of primal fantasies and other traumatic ...”

“... a nuclear war and began the process of aggressively selling the virtues of a nuclear bomb-pumped X-ray laser then in the very early research stages at Livermore. On the evening of 23 March 1983, Reagan startled the world by announcing the Star Wars programme and Teller was in the White House audience, having been specially summoned there by the President. The ...”

“... funny comedy of arrested development: a coming-of-age novel in which the main character is 33. Ray Morris is a shallow, infantile narcissist reluctantly facing the terrors of adulthood, in the form of his general lack of prospects, and the well-advanced pregnancy of his wife, Garthene, an intensive care nurse. (‘It is terrific to have a partner with the ...”

“... partner worthy of her, and transplants it to a utopian matriarchal community in Botswana. For a man to recast Pride and Prejudice as a modern, feminist love affair, and then to set it in Africa, is a bold move, and neither the book’s reworking of the conventions of first-person narrative nor its relentlessly artificial language seem to owe anything to ...”

“... even sound like a book I’d like. It’s the story of Martin Luther King’s murderer, James Earl Ray, mostly on the run in 1968, and mostly for a couple of weeks in Lisbon, spliced with reflection on a crisis (he of course doesn’t use such a word) in Muñoz Molina’s early life twenty years later, when his second child was born and he was trying to find ...”

“... warmed to him. His eccentricity became a disguise, an armour of winking and raillerie concealing a man nobody knew.His upbringing didn’t dispose him to fit in. He was born in May 1866 in Honfleur, to a French father and an English mother who insisted that he was baptised into the Anglican Church. This turned out to be a false start. His father, Alfred, when ...”

“... Who was Max Perutz? There are plenty of good answers. He was an X-ray crystallographer, someone who uses X-rays as a tool to discover the three-dimensional structure of molecules. He was an accomplished skier and climber, with a sideline research interest in glaciology. He was a scientific manager, who founded and presided over Cambridge’s spectacularly successful Laboratory of Molecular Biology ...”

“... of the naughty bits) and chose as their appointed biographer a 24-year-old American, Gordon Ray, who had just finished a doctorate on ‘Thackeray and France’. It was an eccentric choice: they could have had their pick of British biographers. But they wanted someone as remote from London’s gossip circuits as possible. ...”

“... a certain magnetism, it was true, but he looked nothing like the ‘handsome animal’ in the Man Ray photographs Gilot had seen in Cahiers d’art: ‘dark hair, bright flashing eyes, very squarely built’. Picasso came over to Gilot’s table, where she was dining with her friend Geneviève Aliquot and the actor Alain Cuny, bringing a bowl of ...”

“... at the scene, he alludes to it in a few paintings. In The Musings of the Solitary Walker (1926), a man in a bowler hat, a recurrent avatar of the artist, stands by a twilit river, his back turned to a female corpse floating horizontally across the canvas. ‘I don’t believe in psychology,’ Magritte remarked much later, no doubt to forestall facile ...”

“... life as they were listed in the popular counting chant: ‘tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, plough-boy, thief’ (the beggarman didn’t feature in this version). He finds the frequent appearance in Brandt’s pictures of figures in uniform – servants, policemen, nurses, waitresses – deeply ...”