“... member of this last group, my sister announced to the committee that its writer had borrowed, via Paul Virilio, a passage from Gaston Bachelard in which a water-bound creature is described as a ‘principle of vertigo’, dying at every instant as it sheds its substance. Melissa argued that the surfer’s symbolic relation to the shark confirmed Virilio’s ...”

“... The abyss of history​ is deep enough to hold us all,’ Paul Valéry wrote in 1919, as Europe lay in ruins. The words resonate today as the coronavirus blows the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain and the United States, these prime movers of modern civilisation, which proudly claimed victory in two world wars, and in the Cold War, and which until recently held themselves up as exemplars of enlightened progress, economic and cultural models to be imitated across the globe ...”

“... Frank Burty Haviland, to paint 11 large decorative panels for the library of Haviland’s cousin, Hamilton Easter Field. The timid Field drew back midstream, but Richardson reproduces several of the paintings that were made, and one can only regret that the scheme was not brought to completion. Unlike Matisse, Picasso has never been associated with domestic ...”

“... we see him standing at the bar of the Wheatsheaf in Rathbone Place, dressed, as his biographer Paul Willetts writes, ‘in either a camel-hair coat or an astrakhan-collared alternative, together with a pale suit and a brightly patterned tie, augmented by a cane, cigarette-holder, snuff box and dark glasses’, a slave to hard booze and ...”

“... We are used to hard words from Belfast and the impingement (even in so wry and oblique a talent as Paul Muldoon) of uncomfortable sectarian truths. But McGuckian is like Denton Welch, whose war-diaries make no mention of the war: we can only just make out this century, let alone her own particular time and place. In a recent Muldoon poem which turns his fellow ...”

“... you see the film of The Big Sleep,’ Chandler wrote to his English publisher, Hamish Hamilton, ‘you will realise what can be done with this sort of story by a director with the gift of atmosphere and the requisite touch of hidden sadism. Bogart, of course, is also so much better than any other tough-guy actor ... Like Edward G. Robinson, all he ...”

“... Yayoi Kusama and Lee Bontecou; and others were rarely seen at all, such as Romare Bearden, Richard Hamilton and R.B. Kitaj in the Pop gallery, and Eva Hesse, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica in the Minimalist and Post-Minimalist rooms. Some practices are still not an easy fit: an alcove of Conceptual and institution-critical work by Robert Morris, Marcel ...”

“... years ago – has been spent. So too has some $20 billion of the Iraqis’ own money handed out by Paul Bremer, Bush’s proconsul in Baghdad during the first year of the occupation. Much of the money was used to pay for American goods and services and never reached Iraq. Much of the rest disappeared and has never been properly accounted for.* Despite the vast ...”

“... images, were prepared by Dada. And Breton did start out, along with fellow poets Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, in the Dadaist camp, won over by its charismatic leaders, Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia, who had converged on Paris as soon as possible after the First World War. Despite the internationalism of the moment, Breton gave the Surrealist movement a ...”

“... scepticism. New attention has been paid to the political ambiguity of the class, and Richard Hamilton has argued that the Nazi electoral base owed less to the petty-bourgeoisie and more to the bourgeoisie proper than previously assumed. He analysed electoral districts and also made imaginative use of voting returns from fashionable holiday resorts and ...”

“... they rejected James Madison’s scheme of separating powers, siding instead with Alexander Hamilton, who thought that ‘energy’ in the executive was indispensable for ‘good government’. ‘Unbound’ wasn’t supposed to mean ‘unlimited’: Posner and Vermeule argued that ‘public opinion’ would act as the ultimate constraint on a wayward ...”

“... from London in my hands, I spent a long time pondering the implications. For almost fifteen years Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson had insisted they were innocent and had been framed by the police. I recalled that Sir Michael Havers, who led for the Crown in the 1975 trial, had reasoned to the jury that if the Four were ...”

“... in the Dunkirk withdrawal, transferred to combat duties and was wounded in Italy. A third brother, Paul, died in the RAF. Sisters and cousins found various kinds of war work. The values of the clan were conditioned by serious interest in religious and moral issues and by upper-middle-class traditions of public service. The young males were keen on rugger and ...”

“... It was only when Jim McCann, ex-Belfast bomber, current film financier, introduced him to Jean-Paul Belmondo, that his palms started to get clammy. ‘Jean-Paul, let me introduce you to Mark Thatcher, just back from Saudi Arabia.’ A few stiff drinks in the Paris nightclub and he carried it off – until Roman Polanski ...”

“... Brits like Richard Long and Gilbert and George, on old bugbears like Warhol and Richard Hamilton. Shortly before Fuller’s death, he thought the tide was turning: Serota seemed to be coming into line, even Saatchi was investing in the School of London. Then it turned right back. In his last completed book, Theoria: Art and the Absence of ...”