“... to prefer Cézanne to Augustus John. Forced into national service for 18 slack months, he spent most of the time reading, Joyce above all, and Ulysses became the subject of a first suite of etchings; old media attracted him as much as new. ‘Hamilton was fascinated by the skill, the virtuosity and the outrageous power of the command of language that gave ...”

“... Late in August I visited Documenta 11, the most recent version of the mega-exhibition that has been held in the German city of Kassel since 1955, when Arnold Bode, a professor of art at the Kassel Academy, decided to organise an international art show. It achieved such success that it soon became a crucial element of Kassel’s character as a city, once the arms industry had gone ...”

“... stories that have periodically filled front pages since early June we are still in the dark about most of the NSA’s actual methods and day to day activities. The NSA employs more than thirty thousand people and has an annual budget of nearly $11 billion; outside its headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland, it operates major facilities in ...”

“... MoMA has grown from a discreet cluster of salons into an institutional colossus that occupies most of its block. The American Folk Art Museum fell in its march west to Sixth Avenue, and only Saint Thomas Church has blocked its access east to Fifth.MoMA has added 47,000 square feet of exhibition space, a 30 per cent increase for a new total of 165,000 ...”

“... eye, given where things were headed, is that his mother, Emily, played the cello. Russell was no Glenn Gould-style prodigy, but he does seem to have wilfully set his own course from very early on. ‘He was ahead of his age in the things he cared about,’ according to his sister Kate, ‘and that led to all kinds of trouble academically and ...”

“... 52 Republican planes. The Condor Legion played a key role in many Nationalist victories, but its most notorious action was the bombing, carried out with the Italians, of the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April 1937. Twenty-two tons of incendiaries and explosives were dropped on the town, killing several hundred people. The Nationalist forces, still some ...”

“... the pre-eminent contest in world cricket, and that Anglo-Australian rivalry is still one of the most significant in all sport. But it is not true, and it hasn’t been true for some time. The rivalry in international cricket that counts at present is the one between Australia and India. If this were geopolitics, then Australia would be the United ...”

“... the body of a greyhound for beauty’. In one of his notebooks is a list of ‘the world’s most beautiful phenomena’ which includes greyhounds, as well as Ida Rubinstein’s legs and ‘the form and structure of my highly polished cranium’. At the Brescia Air Show in September 1909 – six years after the Wright Brothers’ first lift-off ...”

“... of the later list (for example, LA Confidential, The Usual Suspects, Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould), and a few others (Nil by Mouth, The English Patient, The Truman Show, Shallow Grave) that someone might feel it was worth crossing the road for; but in general his argument that Lane’s evident talent has had little to work on and is condemned to ...”

“... to foil it. This is too deterministic by half, but his thinking is more nuanced when he considers Glenn Gould. On the one hand, he sees Gould as the ultimate performer; on the other, Gould famously withdrew into the recording studio. Yet in doing so, the dying man implies, Gould was so given over to technological manipulation that he overcame the opposition ...”

“... by the NSA and its friends. But, as Luke Harding discloses in his book on the Snowden affair, the most viewed story in the Guardian’s history wasn’t any of this: it wasn’t a piece of news at all. It was the 12-minute video, made by Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, in which Snowden explained who he was and why he’d ...”

“... 1958,’ Steinberg wrote in ‘Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art’ (1962), still the most influential essay on the artist, ‘have these points in common’:1. Whether objects or signs, they are man-made things.2. All are commonplaces of our environment.3. All possess a ritual or conventional shape, not to be altered.4. They are either whole ...”

“... beckoning me into a too sudden intimacy. There is a sensuousness in Mozart’s music which I feel most directly when I try and play it on the piano. The music is extremely tactile, its touchingness embodied in touch, its feelings felt in the fingers. The passage work in the recapitulation of the first movement of the A minor Piano Sonata (K.410), for ...”

“... the edges of our neighbourhood waiting for a lapse of parental oversight to spirit us away. In the most innocent of enterprises, he saw a danger. In every football game he saw the ruptured spleen, the death by drowning in every backyard pool, leukaemia in every bruise, broken necks on trampolines, the deadly pox or fever in every rash or bug bite. It was, of ...”

“... Office, the State Department, the Air Combat Command and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Most important, Richelson is a senior fellow at the National Security Archive in Washington, the pre-eminent American organisation researching the Cold War and US foreign policy, whose work is based primarily on an aggressive use of the FOIA. The National ...”