“... than sixty galleries, at a cost of $450 million. Roughly half of this great sum came from the late David Rockefeller, longtime chairman of the board (his mother, Abby, was a co-founder of the museum), and the other half from just four people: the hedge fund billionaires Leon Black, Kenneth Griffin and Steven Cohen, and the media mogul ...”

“... Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words (2002), ‘but an unpretentious one used primarily by young men in informal circumstances.’ (It’s part of Murakami’s unstuffiness to use it instead of the more formal personal pronouns commonly used in literary Japanese.) Boku tends to be an easygoing type, fond of staying in, cooking, having a couple of beers ...”

“... home a grim lesson: ‘the singer of an April mood, who might have bloomed year after year in young and ardent hearts, is buried in the dust of politics, in the valley of dead bones.’ The personal and aesthetic values of Benson – or of Bloomsbury – are no longer sacred. Even so, there persists a fissure between art and politics which makes us uneasy ...”

“... Russell, studying in what he had understood to be a secular school, Marcus was indignant. And to a young man of his explosive temperament that meant trouble: trouble so serious that, as he tells his story, it becomes evident that he is already dead, killed by Chinese bayonets in South Korea. Roth’s young men often come ...”

“... when the British consul, who used to serve drinks to his Saudi guests, was shot dead by a drunken young prince. Since then alcohol has been banned completely, and high-living Saudis must indulge in their black-market whisky, along with their pirated ‘blue’ videos, in the privacy of their own apartments. There were no Saudis at the farewell party the ...”

“... Minneapolis, which appears in the section entitled ‘Strangers’. Humiston recalls when, as a young architecture student living in the Midwest, he decided to try his luck in New York, a city he knew only from a class field trip. Things begin unpropitiously, when Humiston develops severe diarrhoea while travelling on a Greyhound bus from Kalamazoo in the ...”

“... A recent Italian book on the films of David Lean is called Colour and Dust, and with an amplification or two the phrase offers a pretty good description of his later work. The colour is mainly orange, and a lot of the dust is sand, especially in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). More generally, of course, the phrase evokes the director of swirling epics, a sort of Cecil B ...”

“... he became an author,’ the social connotations of ‘mechanic’ must have grated. Like Dickens, David Copperfield owes his professional start to a ten-shilling shorthand manual: The changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else, entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were ...”

“... pet name, if they have one: so you get two Berties (Edward VII and George VI), Georgie (George V), David (Edward VIII) and Lilibet. When it gets to the Windsors’ foreign cousins there are Willi, Nicky, Charlie (of Norway), Foxy (of Bulgaria), Missy and Mignon. The joke was exploited long ago in Cecil Beaton’s spoof My Royal Past, though Tomlinson’s ...”

“... the subtle effects of falling light. In the same room is a group of portraits of mostly dreamy young men, which in the past or even today have been thought to be by Giorgione. Some of them are rather beautiful, but none looks at all like the San Diego picture, which is more atmospheric, more subtle and more lifelike, but altogether less sentimental. As a ...”

“... doubts are ‘voxpopulated’, orders ‘spontaneified’, someone arrives ‘envehicled’. David Brookshaw’s dexterity achieves a seemingly effortless fit with Couto’s idiosyncrasies. A virginal heiress, Temporina, ‘hadn’t been legged over, but at least she was worth a legacy’; the ex-Marxist Jonas calls his black market deals ‘my ...”

“... be allowed in this country.’ Lady Austin would have enjoyed Elton John’s ‘marriage’ to David Furnish last year – even the Daily Express managed to celebrate it as a ‘triumph for gay rights’ – in the Windsor Guildhall, where Charles had married Camilla only eight months before. Having arrived in the same year as the Civil Partnership ...”

“... to hurry up, finish their studies and take ship to Vietnam.It’s often been said since that these young men would not have been bothered by the war if it were not for their own impending draft notices, and that they were quite prepared to let the underclass be conscripted in their stead. This is quite simply a slander. The arguments and conversations of those ...”

“... and, more violently, how much they loved the heavily lipglossed singer in a band called Japan. David Sylvian was his name. The girls called him David. So far as I remember, the diary was a pretty spectacular fantasia of adolescent lusts and local hatreds: Dear Katherine, David came ...”

“... feeling pessimistic about the outlook for the case. Even the fact that during her early years the young woman in question was becoming fluent in three languages besides her own, and reading assiduously and learning to write letters in an exquisite italic hand, scarcely counterbalances the accumulation of woes, or suggests that the sufferer might go on to ...”