“... 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 ...”

“... Morrisette, the O’Jays, the Sims Twins) and rock (Buffalo Springfield, Iron Butterfly, Frank Zappa). And he had some ideas of his own. ‘A project had been forming in his mind for some time,’ Toop writes, ‘almost an opera, a folklore opera like the old medicine shows.’ At its centre would be a musical hoodoo man, a mysterious figure, almost ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... gone up to Trimdon and his constituency of Sedgefield in order to bring his term of office to a close, ‘resign’ altogether too un-positive a word. The newspapers have been quite kind, but his speech, while ostensibly looking at the state of England, is so self-centred it confirms what one has thought before, that to Blair the real importance of his ...”

“... which she expresses an infant’s sense of entitlement’. She revelled, in other words, in the frank regressive seizure of the breast – in going after what she wanted without shame or pudeur. To read about her life – the prodigal literary gifts, the fearsome productivity, the exotic lovers (male and female), the emotional gourmandising, the sheer ...”

“... fits.In America, I crave the English reality that has disappeared; childhood seems breathingly close. But the sense of masquerade persists: I gorge on nostalgia, on fondnesses that might have embarrassed me when I lived in Britain. Geoff Dyer writes funnily, in Out of Sheer Rage, about the obsession with reading the TV listings in English papers he ...”

“... whether anyone outside the household knew of the relationship. Perhaps the tokens of affection and frank expressions of love mean it should be classified as an untypical case, different from the ‘radical separation between affection and sex’ we find elsewhere. Yet if this story had come down to us only as a record of a sentence – guilty of ...”