“... identity and nationalism caught the imagination. From reading the German racial theorist Max Müller, he learned to consecrate Sinhala blood as ‘Aryan’; in Buddhism he found a religion that could unite the people better than Hinduism could with its local gods. He began to preach against the British to the new Buddhist intelligentsia in small ...”

“... the Epic of Gilgamesh – to Iraq and Egypt. Individual billionaire collectors in the tradition of Arthur Sackler, most of them based in New York (where by far the greatest share of wealth in the antiquities market is exchanged), continued to buy.Remarkably little has changed in the global political economy of antiquities extraction since the mid-19th ...”

“... then you will understand the trrragedy’ – to a student who claimed not to see the point of Max.‘Andrew, with your Kant worrrrk’, ‘Sara, your labours with Krrristeva’, ‘Tony, with your worrrk on Fichte’: four or five of us took every class Rose would give us, and obviously, I called us the Rosettes. Ridiculous, I used to think, addressing ...”

“... director liked to keep the camera moving without drawing attention to the fact. His exemplar was Max Ophüls, for things like the long tracking shot of James Mason and Barbara Bel Geddes in Caught, dancing in a crowded club, nudged close together and realising that they enjoy it. The credited cinematographer in The Killing, Lucien Ballard, had worked with ...”

“... I’m fairly good at working around my limitations. Like numerous five and six-year-olds – or Max Ernst and Hannah Höch, as we ‘creatives’ prefer to say – I do collage. Rubber stamps, along with scissors and glue and glossy pages ripped out from The World of Interiors, are an essential part of my praxis. (I have the art-world jargon down ...”