“... Days of Hope, 1915: The Death of Innocence, Somme, They Called It Passchendaele, The Roses of No Man’s Land, To the Last Man: Spring 1918) are a fairly devastating moral education for the reader. And once you begin to delve, as I have done, into the netherworld of popular military history – battlefield guides, memorial ...”

“... lungs. Non-human illnesses: men dying from the blights of sheep, of birds, of cats, diseases no man had ever died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday ...”

“... was called in to suppress rioting. Among the survivors was Chester Himes, a twenty-year-old black man serving a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery. Himes had already seen his share of troubles but, as Lawrence Jackson writes in his impressive biography, they ‘did not inspire him’ the way that ‘stumbling through the gore of two cell block ...”

“... Darcy’s point of view; the events of Mansfield Park as seen by a maidservant; a play about Anne De Bourgh’s wedding – no minor character or plot line is left unturned. Austenians not only buy and read these books, they maintain a lively conversation, in person and online, about sequels, continuations, adaptations and completions. ‘The ...”

“... or between masters and slaves.’ For such statements he has recently been taken to task by G.E.M. de Ste Croix, in his massive study of The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. Although I agree with Ste Croix that Finley’s treatment of the Marxist theory of classes is somewhat sloppy, I do not believe the substantive disagreements are large. Finley in ...”

“... he sat Lulu next to her while he himself lay recumbent at their feet. The taxi-driver, like the man Magritte had kicked some thirty years before, was so thrown by this ‘solution’ that he drove off without a word. Such behaviour, while diverting, is not so very surprising. What I did find mildly out of character was Magritte’s petty dishonesty – his ...”

“... half a leg but still pluming and gasping in the Spectator about his bad character. Never did a man receive drinks with such a sense of entitlement: he hated himself, of course, which was a burden on everybody, despite the cartoons and all that guff, the play starring Peter O’Toole. Bernard was a nasty, jealous misogynist who found a perfect safe house at ...”

“... blank votes: the second highest proportion in almost half a century. What did the victory of a man claiming to be of the centre who is also the author of a book entitled Revolution really mean? Once he was in office, Macron’s politics became clearer. He began by choosing figures from the centre-right Les Républicains, the successor of Chirac and ...”

“... elsewhere, the favoured colonial minority was always the Islamic one. Perhaps this was because, as Paul Scott has one of his characters say in The Raj Quartet, the British ‘prefer Muslims to Hindus (because of the closer affinity that exists between God and Allah than exists between God and the Brahma)’. The character is Harry Coomer or Hari Kumar, ground ...”

“... been the routine instruments of Fascism, were resolved to prevent anything comparable to German de-Nazification. But they were in a minority in the cabinet, where the secular left held more posts. At this juncture the PCI, instead of putting the DC on the defensive by pressing for an uncompromising purge of the state – cleaning out all senior ...”

“... time, starting with the introduction, a five-page polemic against the spirit of our age: Jean-Paul Sartre – for or against? Raymond Aron – for or against? … Should we take a blowtorch to May 1968 and its ideas … seen now as incomprehensible, elitist, dangerous and anti-democratic? Have the protagonists of that revolution … all become little ...”

“... or Bathers by a River are much harder on the eye. Critics have used the young Matisse – the hard man, the artistic radical – to berate the old, but if (like me) you grew up while he was still alive, it’s with the old Matisses that you almost inevitably start when you try to make sense of the life and the work. And because we felt we knew him, the images ...”

“... Warhol wasn’t interested in the play, but he did want to cast Solanas in an erotic film, I, a Man. On the day she shot Warhol, Solanas rode the six floors with her victim in the elevator up to his office. ‘Solanas’s bullets,’ the Times reported, ‘punctured his stomach, liver, spleen, oesophagus and lungs. At one point, the doctors pronounced him ...”

“... crystal flowers, cellophane curtains and a shrine to George Washington (‘He is the only man I collect’). Like much of her work, her interior design was grand in concept and technically complex but didn’t take itself too seriously. She conjured a European aristocratic past out of flashy, ersatz materials and Americana. One visitor called her ...”

“... designs pumped out by computer, and so its self-presentation highlights the artistry of Foster the man. Almost every project in the Catalogue begins with a sketch or two in his hand, which purports to be the original vision for each scheme. (Foster’s sketch for Stansted airport is above; another, for the Reichstag, is over the page.) It’s a funny ...”