“... or rather it didn’t appear – we know the original only through a photograph taken by his friend Alfred Stieglitz. Duchamp bought a urinal in a shop, signed it with the pseudonym ‘R. Mutt’, rotated it through ninety degrees and placed it on a pedestal as an artwork (one commentator called it ‘Buddha of the Bathroom’). The exhibition ...”

“... Lunching with a friend I notice that the adjoining table is occupied by an elderly gentleman with a vaguely familiar face and three younger companions. He smiles and nods. As lunch proceeds, recognition dawns. It’s the brutish one-time hard-core Stalinist stalwart of the CPGB, later authoritarian and ever-loyal Blairite home secretary, John Reid ...”

“... Writing​ to his friend Stephen Bann, then a graduate student, in 1964, Ian Hamilton Finlay outlined his plans to treat readers of his brash new journal, Poor. Old. Tired. Horse, to a free lollipop, sellotaped to the magazine’s cover. Like many of his plans from this period it came to nothing. In any case, sugar and spice weren’t really Finlay’s thing ...”

“... and Race, a sniffer-out of degenerate art, an opponent of corporatism and decorative excess. His friend the racial theorist, eugenicist and future ill-fated minister of agriculture Richard Walther Darré wrote Race: The New Nobility of the Blood and the Soil at his estate near Jena. Both belonged to the primitive, woodworking, neo-peasant, maypole-hugging ...”

“... to denounce as gross. Later, coveting the cosiness of this set-up, Jesse suggests that he and his friend Fraser move in together: ‘I’d be like your girlfriend or summat. I’d look after ya.’ Jesse has misread the situation. Shortly afterwards, he receives a visit from two Jehovah Brothers, who confront him about his sexuality. The intervention leads to ...”

“... Alexander, Robert Stradling, Beatrix Campbell, Deirdre Beddoe, Stephen Sedley, Lynette Hunter, Andy Croft, Stuart Hall, Antony Easthope and Christopher Norris. The attacks are now commonplace. Raymond Williams and other writers have been making them for several years. What they amount to is this: Orwell, ostensibly a man of the Left, made his work ...”

“... was the first American artist to take ‘the media’ as his medium. (In this, Welles anticipated Andy Warhol, who also enjoys a posthumous existence as a movie character.) George Orson Welles was born in 1915 and appeared first as the wunderkind whose Shakespeare productions – the ‘Fascist’ Julius Caesar, the ‘voodoo’ Macbeth – dazzled New York ...”

“... until they started. Britain ended up third in the medals table, behind China and the US. Andy Murray won the US Open in tennis. Justin Rose won it in golf. This summer, Murray won Wimbledon and Chris Froome followed Wiggins to victory in the Tour de France. The cup ran over. There’s plenty of material for a different story, too. Woodward followed ...”

“... Musée Albert-André, Bagnols-sur-Cèze. Sometimes the thefts are mystifying: in 2016, seven of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup prints were lifted from a museum in Springfield, Missouri: the thieves took beef, vegetable, tomato, onion, green pea, chicken noodle and black bean – but left behind pepper pot, cream of mushroom and consommé (beef). Interpol ...”

“... knowledge out. Then, for the pool of Narcissus, need we look further than the lens of his lifelong friend, Cecil Beaton? Their friendship, from its earliest days, positively throve on the camera, and Tennant’s tributes to his own camera image are so whole-hearted, so zestful, that one cannot help, sneakingly, admiring him for his nerve. ‘I’m nearly crazy ...”

“... of the Premier League action, plus Eurosoccer by the yard, plus The Boot Room, The Big League, Andy Gray and all manner of other soccer-goodies. With Sky, I need never walk again. Why don’t I then – sign up? A few months ago, when it was announced that a deal had been struck between the BBC, BSkyB and the Premier League, my answer would have ...”

“... Later, on the Scottish Daily Express, he shared the subs table with James Cameron, ‘a good friend, a brilliant reporter. In my lifetime the coarsening of the press has been astonishing. Papers are bigger, but there’s less and less news.’ He went to America on the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary. ‘About a hundred reporters,’ he says, ‘each of ...”

“... out and join her brother Leo in Europe. ‘Gertrude, Gertrude, remember the cause of women,’ her friend Marian Walker expostulated. Stein replied: ‘You don’t know what it is to be bored.’ For Stein, the personal was not the political, but the aesthetic. The ‘Mama of Dada’ and the ‘Mother of Modernism’, she anticipated several of the major ...”

“... or Mine ... He holidayed in Marrakech with Paul Getty’s wife, Tahlita, Christopher Gibb (close friend and mentor of Mick Jagger and the society antiquaire) ... He fraternised with the Andy Warhol group and experimented with drugs, drag queens, alcohol. Surely, this is what is meant by ‘having a life’? And yet, Lady ...”

“... ad in the decision to call his current heroine ‘Susan Colgate’; wrappers, video grabs, an Andy Warhol detail on ‘another American town that bought Tide, ate Campbell’s soup and generated at least one weird, senseless killing per decade’. In the latest book there’s a portrait-of-the-artist cameo from a retired TV weatherman who spends his days ...”