“... and moths, from the scientific papers through one-liners down to single phrases (‘like a cabbage-white butterfly flying over the trenches’) to possible allusions, some of which, infuriatingly, escaped me? Boyd offers justifications. For example: ‘The entire selection of Nabokov’s work, published and unpublished, scientific and literary, polished and ...”

“... for which Epstein takes – and is usually given – personal credit). The fall came with the white flight from the metropolis to the suburbs, leaving independent booksellers in the cities without walk-in custom. Enter, in 1969, the book chains, serving a ‘malled’ and wheeled America and offering uniform, centrally managed retail outlets whose ...”

“... up years ago – and because of it too: the pace of change has picked up since then. The mayor, Michael Bloomberg, sometimes talks about the importance of tourism to New York as if tourists were more important to the city than its inhabitants, but when you consider that 44 million tourists visited the city last year – an increase of 25 per cent since 2001 ...”

“... from campaigning or taking office even if convicted. Under the constitution a candidate for the White House needs only to be 35 years of age, a ‘natural born’ citizen and a resident of the country for fourteen years. Those who drafted the constitution were too preoccupied with managing disagreements over slavery and representation to concern themselves ...”

“... to make a note as I got into a hotel lift and observed that it was full of Samoyeds, radiantly white dog-shaped clouds travelling up to the fourth floor in silence, black noses twitching in the dead air.If you watch Crufts on TV, as 8.5 million people do every year, you will see some pretty unusual things. Turn on Channel 4 during the International ...”

“... bones might be deep in Forest Lawn, but the audience expects and will pay for his presence. Michael Jackson Live? It’s a no-brainer, securing the singer a kind of higher existence – a freedom from quibbling reality – that the real Jackson tried to have all his life but could only dream of in a terrifying series of Neverlands.Dead 2Pac appeared at ...”

“... is the writings of the Freikorps, why does he devote so much space to a novel like Goebbels’s Michael, whose author was never in the Freikorps? On the other hand, if he is writing about the literature of fascism, why does he spend so much time on a writer like Ernst Jünger, who never was a Nazi? Come to think of it, why is he so obsessed by Martin ...”

“... of its moods has traditionally suspected that the medical profession is merely the Tory Party in a white coat. Yet even it such diatribes make good agitation, as analyses of reality they are fundamentally flawed. Medical politics have always been, and remain, far more ambiguous. This is deftly shown in Frank Mort’s Dangerous Sexualities, a survey of sexual ...”

“... that has been created. And the book the novelist writes from the inferno is the equivalent of the white flag of reason and peace, of compassion and humane wisdom, a flag all the more poignant because it is spotted with the blood of the innocent. This is the understandable reaction, the instinctive response to slaughter on such a horrific scale. But if the ...”

“... VIP paedophile rings. It went big on ‘Pizzagate’, the bogus 2016 conspiracy theory spread by white supremacists proposing that the Democratic Party was concealing child abuse by senior officials. That’s not to suggest paedophile rings don’t exist, but you need to be careful about the way such allegations can be made to appear instantly substantial by ...”

“... that gives his prose its precision. These letters and the diaries are Maitland’s chief source. Michael Asher’s fine Thesiger: A Biography (1994) chiefly relied on conversations with Thesiger and those who had known him, supplemented by the published works. Now, Maitland’s painstaking use and critical correlation of the Thesiger papers allows him to ...”

“... in the exhibition could have done with some explanation; a version of Richard Wilson’s The White Monk, attributed to his ‘circle’; and a dozen of Constable’s small plein air oil sketches on paper. It will be interesting to see whether the Big Three will still be loveable in the absence of almost all the old favourites that have made them so. The ...”

“... dialogue between the inverted grey ziggurat of the Whitney on Madison Avenue and the expansive white spiral of the Guggenheim on Central Park, another masterpiece of late modernist building-as-sculpture created by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1959, was suspended. But now the Metropolitan Museum has taken over the old Whitney for exhibitions of modern and ...”

“... was – and what sort of artist produced it – was considerably less clear-cut (less black and white) than the graphics it used. Perhaps the most instructive attempt to set out shared principles was drawn up in 1969 by the American artist Sol LeWitt. As befits the idiom current at that moment, the artist’s chosen format was a list of 35 ‘Sentences on ...”

“... countries. Her robe was leaden black and the dress beneath was neither blue nor red, but a souring white. Yet it was not this that had troubled me. No, my discomfort stemmed from the hard, hollow gaze which met mine. It had the anguished persistence of a suffering thing, as if the paint, mask-like, concealed a breathing body. Sadly, Dürer’s real letters ...”