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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... names and life stories. He interviewed Haj Ali Shalal Qaissi, who may or may not be the hooded man of the Abu Ghraib photos. He met Najeeb Abbas Shami, who broke down in tears as he told his story; the Iraqi Chaldean Catholic Rami Khalid Mousa, who worked as an interpreter; and the Syrian businessman Ali Said. This gives him some perspective, and pre-empts ...”

“... she and the narrator run a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister; both are married to a man called John). The book is a composite creature: part memoir, part criticism, part fiction, part feminist tract or call to arms or self-help manual or biography or work of literary history. Perhaps the best clue to what she’s doing comes when the narrator ...”

“... to the west we could see the ridges of Mt Gràmos, the CDA’s last toehold on Greek soil, where Paul Eluard came to visit their trenches and harangue the imperialist lackeys arrayed against them through a megaphone. They were driven out of their positions by US Helldivers – the first use of napalm in warfare. From where we leave the pick-up you can just ...”

“... they see in the blots are butterflies, certainly not piles of female corpses. In the great Olivia de Havilland movie Dark Mirror – she plays good and evil twins – the test is all about Jungian archetypes. But for the actual test – this is the sentence that Rorschachians always repeat – ‘what matters isn’t what you see, but how you see.’ A few ...”

“... ideas were not innate . . . and that toleration in politics and religion is the glory of civilised man.’ But the Age of Reason itself was ‘dominated by French culture’, and ‘it was by the Philosophes and the encyclopédistes that the thought and taste of the civilised world was formed.’ Voltaire with his sardonic smile was ‘the supreme intellectual ...”