“... Interval discussion of the work’s ‘deflected’ sexuality is interrupted by the appearance of Peter Pears, who arrives as a living witness from a kind of heroic era for homosexual artists. The Swimming-Pool Library is a rich and clever and funny novel. The richness is in large part a matter of the density of detail the book manages to accumulate, detail ...”

“... leaving her in imminent danger of being convicted of poisoning her worthless ex-lover. Lord Peter Wimsey, whimsically love-struck and coming to the rescue, confronts the real villain: Yes, well, about this arsenic. As you know, it’s not good for people in a general way, but there are some people – those tiresome peasants in Styria one hears so much ...”

“... about abstraction. He joined a London exhibiting group headed by Ben Nicholson, whose pure white reliefs were the nearest indigenous parallel to the work of Continental avantgardists such as Mondrian, and devised his own handsomely workmanlike ‘Constructions’. In 1935 Piper’s girlfriend Myfanwy Evans launched Axis, a review of ...”

“... American oil companies since that’s ‘what gets the marines coming in’. Meanwhile, Calil knew Peter Mandelson – Mandelson had rented a flat from him – and questions were asked in the House of Commons as to whether ministers or officials had discussed the matter with Mandelson (Mandelson denied it). At any rate, British intelligence soon knew about the ...”

“... as of the continual experimentation involved, he moved to Berlin to work in the office of Peter Behrens, ‘a colossus of daunting stature’. He had no contact with Behrens himself, but did learn about ‘rhythm and subtle relations and many other things previously unknown to me’. That admission must have cost him dear: he was strikingly ungrateful ...”

“... further reproduction of his shameful imaginings’). This time there’s a plot: the young (white) lesbian wife of a grand, gay (white) Southern poet runs off with her infant daughter and conceals herself from his inquiries by passing as a black lone parent. The racial caste system in rural Virginia being what it ...”

“... Lamarr as a significant member of her generation of ‘European exiles to Hollywood’ along with Peter Lorre and Ingrid Bergman. Carefully researched and zippily written, the book is the definitive companion to Lamarr’s films, from the glamour of Ziegfeld Girl (1941), in which Hedy sported a showstopping jewelled headdress, to the screwball comedy Comrade ...”

“... San Francisco artist Jimmy Miles, incline to a dry, coolly minimalist practice, in which white space is not only tolerated, but an essential, if seriously off-kilter aesthetic feature in its own right: I’m not sure what to call Miles’s austere and evacuated style. Some kind of Blakean radical simplicity? A borderline personality’s childlike ...”

“... enormous bay, its long curving marram strands, its islands and roshans and purple hills with the white quartzy dome of Errigal beyond – we stare out and agree that this must be one of the most beautiful places in the whole world. The moist light moves and zings like a Jack Yeats painting – in a different climate these immense empty strands would be lined ...”

“... government that he was attacking. His reputation gained him privileged access to the black and white radical groups operating in South Africa and in Britain (where he was sent by BOSS following a bogus deportation order). Many of those that he ‘befriended’ in South Africa he subsequently betrayed to certain imprisonment, ill-treatment and torture. He ...”

“... from The General Theory was: reflate at all costs. He got rid of not one but two chancellors – Peter Thorneycroft and Selwyn Lloyd – for refusing to expand demand fast enough. Not long after Lloyd’s restrictive 1961 budget, Macmillan was urging him to prepare a reflationary budget for 1962; two days after his 1962 effort, Macmillan was already egging ...”

“... shops closed as the demonstrators had requested and several local factories with mixed or majority white workforces voted to strike. Central Southall was now under the control of several thousand police officers, who set up cordons around the town hall. By 3 p.m. there were already several hundred local residents stuck outside the cordons, and not allowed to ...”

“... in Paris and started to construct his paintings as shallow reliefs, reducing his palette to white. Hepworth called his technique ‘carving out’ and must, Maclean imagines, ‘have felt in some ways that their two art forms were merging’. That year Hepworth, Nicholson and Moore were invited to join Unit One, a group of painters, sculptors and ...”

“... brown hatter’. But in his third novel, Pompes Funèbres, written in 1947, the oppostions are, as Peter Coe points out in his excellent 1968 study of Genet, beginning to show worrying signs of being out of control. In Pompes Funèbres we are offered Hitler as Saviour, Nazi officer Erik Seiler as love object and an ecstasy of moaning over the ravishing of la ...”

“... he was a Job Centre counsellor and a pub bore. The man has embraced infamy like a bride. At least Peter Sutcliffe kept his mouth shut. After his arrest, Nilsen never stopped talking: letters to the Guardian, pages and pages on his state of mind for the police. Indeed, in retrospect, it is this aspect of Nilsen – his unrelenting fascination with words ...”