“... distancing from the feel of the photographic – the blurring and smearing, the way black and white seem to drift towards a weaker, less inflected, more listless overall grey – end up achieving? What does the artist do to the ‘photographic’ and the ‘painted’, as he receives the categories from the culture at ...”

“... kind. Attending a performance of the Leningrad Symphony in the early 1970s, the musicologist Richard Taruskin, then an exchange student at the Moscow Conservatory, was shocked to find that the Soviet audience ‘valued this music, which I had been taught to despise, more highly than I valued any music, and that Shostakovich meant more to his (and ...”

“... to be rich: ‘I already owned five fur coats,’ she wrote in her memoir, ‘so I ordered a white mink, floor length, and wore it with pleasure, even if it did make me look like I was rolling along on casters.’ Despite which, as she discovered, she was being paid less than her male colleagues. Muriel meanwhile battled on against headaches, depression ...”

“... What is history for? What do we want it to do? In 1731, an obscure Kentish schoolmaster named Richard Spencer offered some answers. Properly to ascertain his position in geographical space, he reasoned, required not a single map, but access to a global atlas, one that would allow him to ‘see what London and the adjacent parts are in the kingdom; what the kingdom is in Europe, and what Europe is in the universe ...”

“... It’s hardly surprising that Sandy Arbuthnot falls for this sex goddess of espionage; even Richard Hannay is tempted: ‘I hated her instinctively, hated her intensely, but longed to arouse her interest.’ The idea of the vamp extracting secrets from hapless men is old, but took on a ” new life during the First World War, when spy fever raged. Tammy ...”

“... even a fall in property values. They also consistently identified it with ‘latte-sipping’ or white wine intellos, like the stuck-up East Coast elites familiar in US conservative rhetoric. Right after the vote, Alistair Mant wrote in the Age that ‘Australia is steadily becoming more polarised and more American . . . John Howard’s message throughout ...”

“... Tibet bandwagon has become a sleek and efficient vehicle on which glitterati Buddhists such as Richard Gere, Harrison Ford and the noxious Steven Seagal hitch regular rides. The Chinese occupation of Tibet has become the highest-profile colonial issue in the global consciousness, and a considerable weight about the neck of the CCP. The anti-China lobbies ...”

“... knee breeks black silk stockings high heeled shoes with large buckles, blue coat, yellow vest white neck cloth with stiffner and frilled shirt – he is one of the Queen Ann folks’. The pretty brick so-called Queen Anne style of the 1870s which Thomson thus mocked was the architecture of a perplexed generation. Invented largely by ex-assistants of Sir ...”

“... What he hoped was that go-getting New Labour business leaders would offer themselves: Bob Ayling, Richard Branson, Marjorie Scardino . . . The person he did not have in mind was Ken Livingstone, who, perversely, seemed perfect for the post. Who better to give ‘voice’ to the capital than the man who had bravely said ‘no to no say’ in 1986? Of ...”

“... pay and to return $250,000 to the Trust. It was a spectacularly extravagant decision to commission Richard Meier in 1984 to build a new Getty Center – including the chief museum, the Research Institute and the Conservation Center – as a cluster of buildings on a hilltop in Brentwood accessible only (for ordinary visitors and most staff) by a steep ...”

“... a national conciliator and broker of industrial peace. In 1957 his chief ally in the Labour Party, Richard Crossman, complained in his diary that Wilson ‘grows fatter, more complacent and more evasive each time you meet him’ – and then resolved to make him prime minister. Even Wilson’s enemies found it difficult to pin down precisely what it was they ...”

“... to be more powerful than kings.’The cacophony of voices in McPhee’s book recalls the work of Richard Cobb; it shows a similar sensitivity to regional variation and delight in anarchic individualism. McPhee offsets popular devotion to the revolution with evidence of apathy, frustration and profanity. ‘Vive le roi! The republic can get fucked,’ one ...”

“... Whoroscope, billed as ‘Mr Samuel Beckett’s first separately published work’. Cunard and Richard Aldington had announced a competition – with a prize of £10 and publication – for ‘the best poem on TIME’. The best poem not about time might have been more of a challenge, but the young Beckett, for once letting optimism get the better of ...”

“... inhabitants as McCullers, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee, Paul and Jane Bowles and Richard Wright. (Auden seems to have been an especially terrible housemate, complaining about excessive use of toilet paper and telling people their colds weren’t physical but mental.) Carson was one of the original members; she arrived during her first ...”

“... drifts on for a couple of hours through photogenic wilderness. Man in the Wilderness, which stars Richard Harris, is Woodstock-era to the core: the hero’s wounds more or less heal themselves, enabling him to undertake a spot of anthropological fieldwork on Native American practices on the way home and, even more bizarrely, to adopt a ...”