“... made by his fellow migrants. When he traced a map of the US from his four-year-old son’s wall chart and marked the cities from where his patients had come, a pattern began to emerge. Large, urban centres on the country’s edge – New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami – were the common points of departure. He described what he saw as ...”

“... here means anything to me.’ As he leaves the museum he sees a blackbird, poised against a wall of green, which eclipses all the paintings he has seen. On paying a visit to Monet’s water lilies at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery, he has a ‘terrible urge to walk out’. He couldn’t stand Cézanne. In Vallotton’s work at the 1904 Salon d’Automne ...”

“... as Phillips puts it, is the ‘latrinalia’ of popular culture: the writing on the toilet wall. Trolls are also distinguished from their predecessors by seeming not to recognise any limits. Ridicule is an anti-social force: it tends to make people clam up and stop talking. So there is a point at which, if conversation and community are to ...”

“... nor cares what it means. An invisible barrier separates old from new fairy stories, like the glass wall round the princess in Andrew Lang’s Crimson Fairy Book. In the new ones, however accomplished and diverting they may be, the meaning is clear but coyly hidden, as in many modern fictions; although the examples sought out by Alison Lurie have as much ...”

“... On one wall of the gallery a fan of black feathers slowly parts in the centre and folds back like a bird on a perch stowing its wings. From the lower area of another wall, 11 black stiletto-heeled shoes project outwards in a sparse cluster, while high above them a mechanical device suddenly jerks two extended ladles upwards against two metal arms so that with each repeated spasm a clang directs the viewer’s attention to the great splatters of blue paint that have been thrown by the device, spraying not only the wall behind it but defiling the shoes and floor below ...”

“... was considerate enough when obliterating what he referred to as the ‘Ghost-Ship’ on the end wall to use a distemper which may be removed with water, as he afterwards confessed in the Times. The anchored white liner counted for more in his eyes than did the cycloramic unity of the series, which the unmasking of the ‘Riva degli Schiavoni’ would ...”

“... Hotel; and the St George, a smallish building on the waterfront, was ‘the jewel of Beirut’. Richard and Liz once had a suite; Kim Philby came to stay. Dizzying deals were sealed over handshakes in the bar. Timothy Leary stayed here with some Black Panthers during his Middle Eastern study tour of revolutionary movements. The late Marquess of Aberdeen, as ...”

“... drew on arguments the kings themselves had to make in order to raise taxes and fund their wars. As Richard Tuck has suggested, it may have been Charles himself who opened the door to democracy in England. Levying an ancient tax on coastal towns (ship money) to fund a naval expedition against the Dutch, the Crown made the claim that the people’s safety was ...”

“... of two interviews with Hitler allegedly conducted in 1931 by a senior newspaper editor called Richard Breiting, and subsequently supposedly buried by him in a canister in his garden because he feared for his life should they be discovered. The interviews showed Hitler was making plans to burn the Reichstag two years before the event. ‘In my ...”

“... Directorate, and the man who ran it for almost 34 years was Markus Wolf. When the Berlin Wall fell, three years after his retirement in 1986, Wolf was courted by other intelligence services – West German, American, even Israeli – who hoped to exploit his vulnerable position. Instead he went to Moscow. Returning after the failed August coup of ...”

“... to paranoia. Not the paranoid style in American politics, to quote the title of a famous essay by Richard Hofstadter (how could anyone say farewell to a mode so lavishly on the rise?), but to the paranoid fictions that animated DeLillo’s own novels The Names (1982) and Libra (1988), and went all the way back to Pynchon’s V (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 ...”

“... more devious and ruthless – and certainly more hypocritical – than either Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. Both Reeves and Beschloss show the risks Kennedy took in his liaisons, which exposed him to blackmail, not least by his own FBI head, J. Edgar Hoover. During the Second World War Kennedy became involved with someone with Nazi sympathies, while as ...”

“... of state for communities and local government, tweeted a description of the multimillionaire Richard Desmond as a ‘puppet master’ (Desmond is Jewish), he was not sacked for the antisemitic trope; it was deemed sufficient that he deleted the tweet and apologised when asked to. Meanwhile, it appears that Corbynism’s excitable and often clumsy ...”

“... the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Both these spaces were industrial structures redesigned by Richard Gluckman, who is as much an architect of the Dia aesthetic – a Modernist transparency of structure rendered with a Minimalist sensitivity to space – as any of the artists.In 1994 Wright made way for Michael Govan, a protégé of Thomas Krens, the ...”

“... a policeman leaps from the car, and ignoring the open gate, vaults theatrically over the garden wall, shouting, ‘Here, we want you!’ and the young man is taken away without a struggle.The presence of seven cars, and at least twenty policemen not one of them with the sense just to walk up the street, makes me feel the young man deserved to get away with ...”