“... which parallels the line of eye contact. Even the unsententious may be inclined to feel that some smart adage about blind youth is neatly embodied here, but Bersani and Dutoit argue that Caravaggio’s paintings provide ‘a visual speculation on the meaning and condition of knowledge’ and that this clever robber is ‘perhaps beginning to realise that ...”

“... ideal, but not essential. For the former, one might nominate Trakl, Laforgue, Keats and Shelley (I don’t think I breathed while I was reading Richard Holmes’s Shelley: The Pursuit all those years ago); for a rare, artful blending of long and short, one can’t do better than Rimbaud and Hölderlin; and for the latter, Hamsun, Yeats, Shaw – and ...”

“... the inevitable Kafka, and a further trinity of mad writers, Hölderlin, Nerval and Christopher Smart. The more genial and indeed congenial William Gass describes Walser more modestly: ‘He was a kind of columnist before the time of columns.’ And a further, more modest name is offered: ‘The signature “Harmless Crank”,’ Gass suggests, ‘could be ...”

“... witty concision is still quotable (on Gielgud in modern dress: ‘The general aspect of a tight, smart, walking umbrella’), much of his excitement outliving the occasions that produce it. But there have been other theatre critics with dapper styles and deep commitments whose names faded once their work slid out of print, once-prominent tastemakers such as ...”

“... rap music and trips into the countryside with Niall Cahill, from the charity Includem. ‘He was smart, generous and funny,’ Cahill told me, ‘but there was a dark side to him too.’ Like many teenagers, William sometimes drank too much and when he did, he tried to hurt himself. On one occasion, he took an overdose; on another, he wandered onto the ...”

“... whose wealthy but very dysfunctional family introduced what a later commentator called ‘a pretty smart touch of insanity’ into the Foote genes. His early years are typical enough of a spendthrift younger son battling his way out of provincial obscurity: a curtailed career at Oxford noted mainly for its bibulousness; a failed business venture in the ...”

“... women as both objects and victims of male sexual desire. Instead of the servus callidus, the smart-alec slave, we get a new stereotype: the bona meretrix, the hooker with a heart of gold. The female characters in Terence – including prostitutes and even mothers and mothers-in-law – are almost all nice, admirable, thoughtful, victimised people. The ...”

“... during their February 1968 occupation of Hue than the My Lai killers did. The Vietcong were merely smart enough not to allow their massacres – or their frequent disembowellings and live burials of village chiefs who declined to support them – to be recorded on camera, as My Lai was, or to become the object of war crimes trials. A majority of American ...”

“... be called ‘Las Palmas, Weekend-in-Havana . . . Pussycat . . . Tropicana . . . Flamboyant . . . Don Camillo . . . Metropole, Lido, Apollo Theatre’. All the same, it’s no use tucking this list in your top pocket and heading for the tropics in search of a wild night, as Chernoff makes a practice of ‘switching them from one town to another’ and tells ...”

“... hint of France’: ‘the white wine’, ‘the shops’, ‘the high-heeled Lolitas in the smart areas of Providencia’. In Les Masques, he revels in the clear Santiago mornings and imagines the first balmy days of the Popular Front in France. Meanwhile he had begun to face the fact that Cuba was not the place he’d remembered. In February 1971 when ...”

“... Frank Lloyd Wright designed house previously owned by the shah of Iran), he said to Geller: ‘I don’t want to perform any more. I want to leave the world. Find me a monastery. I want to become a monk.’ But his ascetic mood soon passed (as every Elvis mood passed, each brief and delicious horripilation), and the marker of this grand spiritual event ...”

“... called ‘my Indian vindictiveness’. ‘You mustn’t tell me a single thing about Gibson if you don’t want to detract from the pleasure of your letters from fifty per cent up,’ he instructed a mutual acquaintance in 1915. He had decided that Gibson was ‘a coward’ and ‘the worst snob I met in England’. Walter de la Mare’s failure to write to ...”

“... The Manchurian Candidate began as a novel by Richard Condon, who with Don DeLillo has done more to anatomise and dramatise the world of covert action than any ‘authorised’ chronicler. Before discussing Norman Mailer’s magisterial bid for dominance in this field, I want to use Richard Condon to anticipate a common liberal ...”

“... of suspended anxiety: the urge to fall asleep on an uncomfortable bench, to eat food you don’t need, to purchase goods as a token sacrifice against the hazards of travel. Leaving an older self behind, rooted, watching as you walk away, involves an element of risk. Stations are non-denominational places of worship, staffed by preoccupied ...”

“... a discontented moment. Lots of people, not just Lichtenstein, were getting ready to jump ship. Don Judd was polishing his anti-Hessian prose.A defence of the new de Koonings, then, had better be double-edged. Fairfield Porter’s review in the Nation on 6 June is worth quoting at length. Porter was clever and unpredictable: he’d filled Greenberg’s ...”