“... the Algerian war), was put in charge only to be shown the door a few months later. Stora, nowadays close to the Socialist Party, was a good choice for the Ministry of Culture if they were to provide funding, which seemed to be the plan. But he didn’t suit the mayor of Aix, an eccentric figure on the right of the UMP who has no qualms about electoral ...”

“... friend. Before returning to America in 1915, he wrote home with some news: ‘To be perfectly frank with you I am one of the most notable craftsmen of my time. That will transpire presently.’ In their sharp-witted introduction, the editors of the Letters excuse this by claiming that ‘bragging isn’t really “bragging” when it’s so manifestly a ...”

“... use of Ecstasy on the same plane as evocations of Whistler’s brushwork, Henry James’s prose or Frank Lloyd Wright’s way with a building. This was a sensibility that seemed not to recognise a separation between high and low, past and present, glory and disgrace. The immediate context for the disruption of The Stranger’s Child was that Hollinghurst had ...”

“... no Ricky, she said.Ricky was worse, the beam said.Well, she said. If you knew Ricky.That’s as close as we come to the reality that has stung him into writing this story: we do love our Rickys, even though they are worse.‘The Mom of Bold Action’ is one of those stories, which have appeared from time to time since In Persuasion Nation (2006), that ...”

“... of contemporary events for the illustrated newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s. Lance Calkin, Frank Craig, Samuel Begg, Paul Renouard and others filled the pages of the Illustrated London News, the Graphic and Black and White while continuing to exhibit at the Royal Academy and the Salon. Their newspaper work – its realism and variety of subjects, its ...”

“... about the forms, and no aspect of this dissatisfaction is more evident than the abandonment of any close connection between the forms and value. The unity of the forms which earlier had ensured their purity was given up when it became evident that analysis required that the forms blend with one another (as pleasure does with good and bad – the critical ...”

“... of freedom throughout the world.’ As the ticker-tape begins to twirl down on the stage, you see Frank Sinatra beaming from the crowd (he never got over John Kennedy’s snubbing him in favour of Bing Crosby in 1962), and, off to stage right, a slightly out of control and overexcited person in a tan suit, the vice-presidential nominee’s son George. There ...”

“... too, has its plaque; it is a living memorial, planted on 12 June 1998: ‘To commemorate Anne Frank and all the children killed in wars and conflicts this century.’ The plaque quotes from Frank’s diary: ‘I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will ...”

“... rewards of their villainy are scant, the fences with whom they deal miserly and the police always close behind. At the end of the first series, Bunny is sent to prison and Raffles apparently drowns at sea, only to surface again in the next series, but living in hiding disguised as an elderly invalid – a disguise that completely fools Bunny, as Raffles’s ...”

“... clearly misunderstood a passage in the White Diaries. Although there are discrepancies which come close to being howlers, there is no moment in the Black Diaries which settles the argument either way. Basil Thomson, who was the chief of the Special Branch created at Scotland Yard at the beginning of the First World War for the detection of enemy ...”

“... ironic, single-breath, present tense, synthesised diary-takes by one of the great Americans; Frank O’Hara on his lunch hour from the Museum of Modern Art; Douglas Woolf driving somewhere, between jobs; Fielding Dawson. Drummond speaks of the pieces that make up 45 as ‘stories’. Some of them are very short, a set of acknowledgments dropped into the ...”

“... movies out like sausages, and it turned out to be a very good idea: the assembly-line concept,’ Frank Capra said. ‘They weren’t our films then. They were called our “product”.’Just as the geriatric jamboree of silent filmmakers starts to lose steam, Jeanine Basinger intrudes herself like an anxious hostess into the conversation and into ...”

“... its long aftermath. In response he passed not just a major cyclical stimulus, but also the Dodd-Frank Act, to regulate finance, and Obamacare, the single most significant domestic policy reform in decades. But Obama was enough of a man of the 1990s to believe that crisis was temporary and normality was just that, the norm. It would return.That assumption ...”

“... Nazi abbreviation of Konzentrationslager. Wachsmann’s book is a world-making history: from the close observations of individual lives and moments, and of historical forces great and small, his subject emerges. It is no ordinary world. ‘There are times when history is let off the leash,’ the Polish academic Jan Kott remembered one of his teachers saying ...”

“... with English humanists’ – who therefore speak through Claudius’s rebuke to Hamlet for the frank wastefulness, the sheer childishness, of his grief for his dead father. Indeed, formally most Tudor writers themselves spoke with him, apologising for what they tended to throw away (like Puttenham) as ‘but the studie of my yonger yeares in which vanitie ...”