“... 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 ...”

“... Duke Ellington’s ten-man group of 1927-32 was billed for a time as the Jungle Band, a title in keeping with the Southern plantation/Afro-Deco interior and exotic-erotic floor shows of the Cotton Club, the grandest Harlem venue (it seated more than six hundred), where Ellington performed, before whites only, for the five years from 1927, and in the spring seasons of 1933, 1937 and 1938 ...”

“... bisexual … Nothing but humiliation and degradation at the thought of physical relations with a man.’ Sontag read and reread Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, a book she loved for many years, both for its Modernism and its lesbianism. At the campus book exchange, she finally met an arty girl, Harriet Sohmers, several years older than her and superior in one ...”

“... wheat like a girl plaiting her hair, far from Russia’s canals quivering with sunstroke, a man living with English in one room. The tourist archipelagoes of my South are prisons too, corruptible, and though there is no harder prison than writing verse, what’s poetry, if it is worth its salt, but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth? Hill, I ...”

“... while the loser fights back, eventually achieving a robust ‘consciousness of self’ (conscience de soi) and attaining full humanity. Kojève adds a pinch of Nietzsche by calling his antagonists ‘Master’ and ‘Slave’, and follows it with a dash of Freud, saying that the slave responds to humiliation by constructing an ‘ego’ or ...”

“... and quite different from narco-terrorism in Columbia, CIA-Contra terrorism in Nicaragua, strong-man terrorism in Panama, or the urban guerrilla terrorism of the Tupamaros. Peru is under siege from a wholly anachronistic but apparently invincible Maoist revolutionary army, Sendero Luminoso – Shining Path. This purist faction sees itself in conflict with ...”

“... loving middle-aged wife to her browsing husband and then to the assistant: ‘He’s a real cheese man.’ Odd how I could take such a place without question did I come across it in New York, say, or California. But here it’s so bound up with class and money and all one’s complicated feelings about England I hold back. Like Saga, another rich and popular ...”