“... public than was the case with the keen lovers of the contemporary art of former periods. In North America, over the last quarter of a century at least, ‘modernism’ has almost always meant large works designed for the Museums of Modern Art. The first artists to produce works for such a destination were the supposed founders of the Modern ...”

“... Square declared.) My own experience of being got away, by car from London to Cwm-yr-Eglwys on the north Pembrokeshire coast, at least found some relief towards its conclusion in the spectacle of the Port Talbot steelworks, a lattice of towers and gantries backlit by sunset and threaded through with plumes of steam. But I knew exactly how they felt.Hulot is a ...”

“... of the skirmish at Clifton, just south of Penrith, in December 1745, as the Jacobites moved back north. In this, what O’Keeffe calls the last battle ‘ever fought on English soil’, government dragoons had dismounted when the Appin Stewarts and MacPhersons charged downhill out of the winter dusk. A MacPherson remembered ‘the great hurry with which we ...”

“... he himself, though exiled and out of favour through accidents of war, unquestionably belonged. As Paul Cartledge writes in his introduction to Tom Holland’s new translation of Herodotus, the resemblance Thucydides’ merciless analysis of civil war on Corfu bears to Orwell’s reading of totalitarianism, complete with doublespeak, was exploited to some ...”

“... many of the world’s most powerful finance ministers, economic experts, lawyers and politicians north to the White Mountains. At the opening of the conference, the main attraction seemed to have been Keynes himself. According to Lionel Robbins, he ‘was photographed from at least 50 angles … Lord Keynes standing up; Lord Keynes sitting down; Lord ...”

“... Grief Management Council. He works in the New York Stock Exchange, she in the World Trade Center, north tower, 83rd Floor. Both are ciphers, spun by the formal games and architectural spaces and personal circles they move in. The book begins in an airplane, destination unknown, as the passengers watch the in-flight movie about revolutionary terrorists ...”

“... was nothing to morality except emotion. He also made a trip to Paris, where he learned about Jean-Paul Sartre and the existentialist doctrine that our characters are the product of our unconstrained choices. He noticed that Ayer and Sartre, despite their different styles, were dancing to the same philosophical tune: both hoped to achieve moral liberation by ...”

“... etc – by the ‘primes’. Silicon Valley wants a piece of this bounty.When​ colonists in North America began to mobilise against British rule, the army found itself short of the engineering skills required for fighting a war. Many French officers joined the Continental Army as sappers and miners, and as builders of fortifications, trenches, naval ...”

“... Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into hysterical denunciations of prolixity), the Report is a model of clarity. Its narrative is compelling and its conclusions stark in their ...”

“... sonnets, his most famous and least typical poems, which had just been praised by the dean of St Paul’s for their ‘pure and elevated patriotism’. Churchill’s threnody to an already mythical soldier-poet appeared in the Times three days after his death: ‘Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classical symmetry of mind and body, he was ...”

“... Which would make Ziggy Stardust the beautiful butterfly that emerged from the chrysalis. Paul Trynka begins his biography with a description of Bowie’s performance of ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops on 5 July 1972. It was three years since ‘Space Oddity’ had made it into the top ten after being used by the BBC in its broadcast of the Apollo 11 ...”

“... yet have a particular meaning. For some reason not yet clear to me, I noted down the names of Paul Ives, Graham Paine (‘who lost his life by drowning’), Clifford John Dunn, Ronald Alexander Pinn and John Hill, all of whom were born in the 1960s, as I was, and died early.The practice of using dead children’s identities began in the Metropolitan ...”

“... to follow, exactly two weeks later. Explosions seemingly orchestrated by Newton’s compasses: north, south, east, west. Contemplated in this setting, alongside Gormley’s Planets, the numerology was disturbing. The original expedition, recording the names of dead railwaymen, the erasures, was a hallucination, a sleepwalker’s fugue in the lull before ...”

“... an editorial/reviewing slot, ‘Le Salon de lecture’, where he wrote about La Conspiration by Paul Nizan, and two works of fiction – La Nausée and Le Mur – by Sartre. The pieces on Nizan and Sartre are often quoted, unlike his review of La Pasionaria’s speeches and writings (not ‘a great book’ despite the ‘unforgettable’ voice of a ‘lucid ...”

“... in the town in 1946. I knew some of these people: Dan Bolger, for example, whose grandfather, Paul, had donated money in 1846. Dan Bolger had a shop in the town. It was hard to think of him, or any of these people, having grandparents who knew ‘bitter hunger, starvation and death’. Most of them had inherited property and exuded a certain ...”