“... Modern display does well, for example, by videos. In one, made by Gary Hill in 1994, you see his young daughter Anastasia reading from Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour. She is pretty and reads very nicely, stumbling only on the odd long word, but not, one assumes, understanding any part of it. Another, Anri Sala’s Dammi i Colori (2002-03), is about the ...”

“... no sustained narratives of disease. Autobiographies in the shadow of death were rare and brief. In David Hume’s six-page-long account of his life there are four sentences about his impending end: ‘I was struck with a disorder in my bowels which at first gave me no alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a ...”

“... Can you tell the difference in principle between these two leaks? In 1983, a young civil servant at the Ministry of Defence was so outraged by her Secretary of State’s plans to head off a demonstration against Cruise missiles that she copied the relevant document and delivered it in an anonymous envelope to the Guardian newspaper ...”

“... any Scots from the indictment (though – unkindest cut – he does exonerate one Welshman, David Jones). Worse still for Crawford, Kenner announces, ‘There’s no longer an English literature’: by which he means that, whereas ‘talent has not been lacking’ – on the contrary, ‘good poets are dispersed round the land’ and each has a personal ...”

“... whether his demise was deliberately accelerated by a doctor. Was it just coincidence that the young man took a dramatic turn for the worse directly after the arrival of the Queen’s physician? Why was he in such agonising pain? Was pneumonia the true cause of his death? To this day there are those who are convinced that poison was administered to Prince ...”

“... in Swarming and the Future of Conflict (2000) by the RAND Corporation’s John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt. Technology, Arquilla and Ronfeldt argue, will soon make it possible for small clusters of loosely organised military units to conduct brief and co-ordinated strikes, then disperse. Message boards, similarly, allow lone hackers to share targets and ...”

“... and folk tales are clumsy and blundering and foolish, and their strength doesn’t always prevail: David fells Goliath with a slingshot (like a child in a bombsite playground), and poor boy Jack can outwit the ogre at the top of the beanstalk, however big and strong and vicious and rich he is, and make off with the golden goose. Such stories are popular ...”

“... did not edit the Bannatyne Manuscript. It was edited by his colleague in the Court of Session, Sir David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, whose Annals led Sir Walter Scott to laud him as ‘the restorer of Scottish history’. Does it matter that the notorious cry of ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ greeted Home’s tragedy in London, not Edinburgh? It ...”

“... her full gear – knowing that in a hundred years’ time she’d look extraordinary.’ Ono was a young child when Tokyo was firebombed by American forces in 1945; she knows all too well what a demolished city looks like. She goes on: ‘This, in practice, would mean that as a filmmaker you don’t really have to make a film any more but just put your name ...”

“... any woman who has clawed her way to the top has an innate hatred of all other women, especially young and beautiful and talented ones. Yep. We’ve come a long way, baby. Just not in what the blurb to Scandal calls ‘the cut-throat and male-dominated world of newspaper journalism’. So here we have Sharon. Common by name and common by nature. Sharon edits ...”

“... subscribing to le dernier cri from Europe’. Rothko dominates an essay in the Hopper catalogue by David Anfam, the author of the Rothko catalogue raisonné, who notes that ‘so much has been written about Edward Hopper that perhaps one of the few remaining royal roads by which to approach him is via another massively interpreted artist.’ Anfam makes the ...”

“... Protestant and notoriously sectarian part-time constabulary. His father, uncles and aunt (who died young, having never fully recovered from injuries she sustained when a car crashed though a checkpoint she was operating) were part-time members of the Ulster Defence Regiment, the local wing of the British army which replaced the B Specials. This allowed the IRA ...”

“... The only other visitors we see are a couple of middle-aged ladies and a senior figure with four young people (which exactly describes them) all wearing Clockwork Orange type bowler hats and seeming, we all agree afterwards, insufficiently awed by the privilege being accorded them. Which we decidedly are not, twenty years after it was bestowed still the ...”

“... to produce the authorised biography Big Bill is waiting for. So he gets in touch with a shady young ‘researcher’, the lemur of the title. The lemur, who seems to know a good deal about the Mulholland family already, gets to work. A week later he phones Glass to tell him he’s discovered something big, big enough that Glass will surely be willing to ...”

“... suggest that she is depicting herself playing the part of a gypsy musician, the kind of alluring young girl at her instrument favoured by contemporary Dutch painters. We can’t be sure if Artemisia was the ‘Sig.ra Artimisia’ who is recorded as having sung and danced in gypsy costume for a performance at the Medici court in 1615. But the possibility ...”