“... Speaking of the American painters he championed in the 1960s – Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Frank Stella – Fried observed that their work ‘not only arises largely out of their personal interpretations of the situation in which advanced painting found itself at crucial moments in their respective developments’: it ‘also aspires to be judged, in ...”

“... two halves, one a history of the firm (with instructive, if unsightly, bar-charts) and the other a close analysis of the editorial formula. This method, as he admits, involves much overlapping. The book virtually ends with the takeover by Harlequin Books in 1971 and only a short afterword touches on the sensational expansion since then, ‘an epic tale worthy ...”

“... at his memorial service. ‘So many of us felt that was his destiny.’ He himself was engagingly frank in discounting this scenario, saying that ‘it would have been a disaster for the Party, country and for me.’ Certainly, he never looked back with any wistfulness, still less envy, on the way that this possibility was foreclosed by the spectacular rise ...”

“... tinged with religious yearning, while the earthier Count Guillem de Peiteus preferred love at close hand: I can’t stand their vern acular Who’d keep my love from me afar. By way of words, I guess I’ve found A little saying that runs rife: Let others mouth their loves around; We’ve got the bread, we’ve got the knife. (Snodgrass) The unlikely ...”

“... mystics. In order to cram some of them, like Knut Hamsun, into his box and then to be able to close the lid, Gay has to create the category of anti-modern Modernist. He arranges his protagonists in traditional groupings, visual artists first, followed by the literary crowd, the music consort, then architects and designers, and finally dramatists and ...”

“... contained. It included such early classics as R.S.R. Fitter on the natural history of London, and Frank Fraser Darling on the Scottish Highlands. Rackham has all their verve and learning, the same immediacy in the telling, but an even greater wish to involve the reader in a problem and its solving. It is, he says, a book more about questions than answers. It ...”

“... like he is absorbing the Viktor Orbán lesson.’ Among the speakers at NatCon London was Frank Furedi, the former leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party who currently heads the Brussels branch of a private Hungarian college that has received billions of forints from Orbán’s government. He’s called it ‘a chance to fight back in the culture ...”

“... notices about Elena McMahon in The Last Thing He Wanted). Let me qualify ‘lovely’. It’s too close to something Didion might have picked up shopping (and she is crazy about clothes – you rarely know what her people look like, but she tells you all about the colours and the fabrics of their clothes, and the shops they came from), and it may be unduly ...”

“... in order to become a simple infantryman. His best friend, Maggio, played by an impishly wiry Frank Sinatra, has just died as a consequence of the beatings meted out by a thuggish fellow soldier. Now, Prewitt plays the bugle again, offering up a personal military requiem for Maggio, a faintly bluesy lights out. The music fills the camp, and the other ...”

“... from Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the first president of post-Soviet Georgia, no Soviet-era dissident came close to assuming power in the manner of Lech Walesa or Václav Havel. But several of them, including Sakharov (released from internal exile), Liudmila Alekseeva (returned from exile in the United States), Revolt Pimenov (free after multiple jail sentences and ...”

“... Blair/Bush correspondence – it was claimed that disclosure could make future leaders chary of frank discussion – means the inquiry has been limited to ‘gists’, though Chilcot says these will be ‘sufficient to explain our conclusions’. There were further delays because of the need to declassify thousands of documents; this wasn’t completed ...”

“... other than alive. The trick was to distinguish appealing and enabling myths from noxious ones. Frank Kermode, in The Sense of an Ending, written before Kermode came across Barthes, I think, but nevertheless a book that seems to have Barthes in mind, to be waiting for him, thought an attention to the difference between myth and fiction might do some of this ...”

“... airplane engines and turbines, and the huge workshops with their avant-garde design, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax HQ in Racine, Wisconsin. A question that recurs at every turn in Freeman’s long story is whether workers’ suffering in the early years of industrialisation was really necessary. This debate begins with Adam Smith’s ...”

“... of individuals who later had significant roles in the Nazi Party, including Rudolf Hess, Hans Frank and Alfred Rosenberg. After considering in more detail the Nazi Party’s use of demonising supernatural imagery to win over voters, the book moves in its second part to explore the Third Reich leadership’s relationship with magic and the occult and the ...”

“... on him by the other characters, who are at once total strangers to him but also appear to be close family members. At last, about two-thirds of the way through the novel, he manages to find somewhere to practise, a ‘little wooden hut’ at the top of a hill with ‘an upright piano of somewhat grubby appearance’. But even here the irresistible ...”