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“... A Little Spasm and Whims promoted a Wildean cult of decadence, and were mocked by the naturalist Frank Norris in his novel The Octopus as ‘little toy magazines’. Symbolist-inspired bibelots appeared in Berlin, St Petersburg, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Alexandria and elsewhere. Around the same time, the market for publications was exploding. It’s estimated ...”

“... Homeresque epithets (every attractive woman is a ‘hardbody’ with ‘big tits’); sudden frank (and probably fake) declarations of emotion. Of course, the book also contains scenes of unparalleled repulsiveness: multiple rape-murders, dismemberments, disembowelments and the like. That several small logical impossibilities, scattered ...”

“... and ghost dances. He acquired the services of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Jean-Louis Barrault, Robert Frank, Ornette Coleman and Ravi Shankar. And he called his film Chappaqua. Ferlinghetti’s Aunt Emily removed him from the orphanage when she was taken on as French governess to the daughter of Presley Eugene Bisland, whose father-in-law founded Sarah Lawrence ...”

“... in politics. Not that the Young Conservatives were aimless sybarites. To the Tory journalist Frank Johnson they were just as zealous in their own way as Maoists – ‘a ruthless organisation dedicated to one fanatical aim: marriage’. Tim Bale’s latest book, The Conservatives since 1945, examines the motors of change within the party at every level ...”

“... been dubbed “barcode façades”’; and finally the ‘iconic’ works of the starchitects – Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind et al – who, Hatherley sneers, ‘manage to combine formal spectacle and moralistic sobriety’. Such is the bagginess of pseudomodernism that there’s room not only for former ...”

“... is, after all, a museum in LA up on a bluff above the deep canyon the 405 runs through; it isn’t close to anything, except some mansions up in the heights with it, and public transport is largely an underclass phenomenon.) The old Getty in Malibu had been modelled after a Roman villa, all colonnades and porticos, and the new one, too, is full of Europeanate ...”

“... focus, but unable to yield anything but a fuzzy middle distance. He is certainly given to close observation of colourful characters and exotic scenes; indeed we acquire a much more solid sense of Chuck than of Rachel, and in one scene the immigrant bazaar that is Coney Island is pictured with a vividness never accorded Hans’s own Chelsea or ...”

“... his fellow countrymen’s propensity to declare, in the words of the Paul Anka song popularised by Frank Sinatra, ‘I did it my way.’ Thomas, however, construed these lines personally, as a challenge not only to his dithering, but also to his involuntary sense of poethood, in which choice, he insisted, played no part. ‘It is all very well,’ he wrote ...”

“... Augustine was black. The longest and most revealing correspondence is with Niall Montgomery, a close friend from university and later a collaborator on his newspaper column, with whom O’Nolan liked to share in-jokes, but on whom he could turn like a terrier, as in this 1964 letter accusing him of plagiarism: ‘You are known to far more than me as the ...”

“... few trips to New York, including momentous visits to the Museum of Modern Art, where he catches a Frank Stella retrospective, and the Guggenheim Museum, where he sees a Moholy-Nagy exhibition. On his return to France, Bois gives up his own artmaking, and after a tedious course in Pau he decides against art history too. The siren call now comes from critical ...”

“... Ten’ recent cultural attractions. There’s special praise for the 2014 City Lights reissue of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, a ‘time machine’ to a different New York, in which ‘insouciance’ was ‘the name of the game’ (sounds like the kind of conversation she wouldn’t have minded joining). More revealing still, however, is the reaffirmation ...”

“... occupation of Vietnam and Algeria throughout the 1940s and 1950s. On a personal level Breton was close to the Afro-Cuban-Chinese artist Wifredo Lam in Paris, and on his way to New York in 1941 he spent several weeks in Martinique, where he met with Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, key figures in the négritude movement (Aimé had published his great Cahier d’un ...”

“... give up on the idea of an oral history of Cuban life under communism. In 1975 he asked his close friend Gabriel García Márquez, who was enamoured of the revolution, to write it. García Márquez worked on the project for a year, then gave up. He told friends that what Cubans said didn’t fit the book that he wanted to ...”

“... old hens, they just say “Quar!”’ The savagery of these battles was unavoidable given the close nature of the conflict and the relentlessness of the enemy attacks. The defeat of the Egyptian nationalists at Tel-el-Kebir in 1882 was a harbinger of the future: once the ramparts were overwhelmed, there was a lot of ‘bayonet work’ and ‘very little ...”

“... calls, tactfully enough, ‘a carefully arranged life of the senses’. All three enjoyed the frank and gilded perquisites of money and class. Even the fashion writer Madge Garland, embarrassed by her provincial Australian roots and the only one of the three who really had to work for a living, might be described as aristocratic-by-default, in the same ...”