“... two years in Pasadena. Caltech then boasted a slew of world-changing scientists, and in particular Max Delbrück, who was orchestrating the birth of molecular biology – ‘exhilarating proof that someone with my bent might have a chance after all’. But his work there led nowhere and Mandelbrot returned to France, to serve his compulsory year in the ...”

“... and exploiting greater and more bountiful fields than their own country could provide’. The ‘black Scots’ who remained were ‘demotic, parochial, sensitive about community to the point of reaction, but keeping the ladder of social promotion open, resisting the encroachments of the English governing class’. Ascherson had just left his job as the ...”

“... of her personality. Jon Stallworthy had called her ‘the New England Nefertiti’. Anne upstaged Max again that night at the reading, making an entrance slowly from the back of the room in a long red dress, diamond rings flashing on her bony fingers as she chain-smoked through a series of poems that began with the signature poem, ‘Her Kind’: I have gone ...”

“... was impatience in the faint lines around his eyes.’) They are very Christian-namey: it is all ‘Max’ and ‘Camille’ and ‘George-Jacques’ between them. They are profane, in today’s style. Once Lucile Desmoulins ‘might have said the prayers for the dead. Now she thought, what the fuck’s the use, it’s the living I have to worry ...”

“... emotionally from a woman he despises – from Nellie Beatrice with her flaking face-powder and her Black Looks. The consequences of this failure are played out in the second volume: they are a disabling misogyny, a series of failed and painful relationships, a grim determination to spit in the world’s eye. He is not lovable, he knows; very well, he’ll be ...”

“... another interpretative framework. Everyone from Christian occultists to Expressionists such as Max Beckmann and Otto Dix linked the war to the Apocalypse, either as phantasmagorical metaphor or accurate prediction. Were the British not Israelites fighting Germany’s Assyrians? Surely the Western Front could be seen as Armageddon? ‘Never in the whole ...”

“... himself on his ability to turn out a thousand good words in no time and under pressure: the reason Max Hastings, who followed him as editor of the Telegraph, and his successors always wanted to keep him on as a writer. He can be cutting about journalists whose main ambition is to rise to an executive level where they only boss around those who write – and ...”

“... them by country with a special ‘Borderline’ category within the UK list containing only Max Hastings. Swire is more sweeping in her acknowledgments to ‘all the Cameroons for not mentioning me or barely mentioning me in their memoirs – this is payback!’ But is it? Neither of these dispiriting books makes its author sympathetic. Having at last ...”

“... colour of [human] Nature, which climate, food and customs alter and change into yellow, brown or black.’ The ‘most handsome and best built men’ among the whites were to be found in the most temperate part of Europe, between the fortieth and fiftieth degrees of latitude. By a happy coincidence, Perpignan sits on the 42nd degree of latitude and Dunkirk ...”

“... and the intensity of this viewing-and-reviewing can be a bit wearing. (‘Enough with the blue-black curtain!’ is one of my margin notes in the chapter on still lifes.) Ditto all the rhetorical questions and Socratic teases: ‘Is it the case …’, ‘Can we agree …’ and so on. At the same time If These Apples Should Fall is a very generous ...”

“... had been bedevilled by some 19,000 US Army deserters involved in large-scale robbery and black market dealings in the rear areas.’ One group syphoned off petrol needed for tanks and sold it on the French black market. Whiting’s italics and exclamation-mark seem amply justified when he reports that from February ...”

“... The first is Gallery Nine at Burlington House, a square room where superb Frank Steallas of his black period confront us from the back wall while in the middle of the floor, humped in silence, is Robert Morris’s big low cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No self-respecting museum would ...”

“... the poems sold well. Early photographs show a delicate, intense, ephebic young man with a shock of black curls; the journalist Edoardo Scarfoglio, who knew him in Rome in the early 1880s, said he had the look of a ‘timid, wild girl’. The curls soon disappeared. This loss he attributed to the use of iron perchlorate to treat a scalp wound after a duel, a ...”

“... domestic, balancing the psychological grimness of Maigret’s investigations, and the jet-black view of humanity embodied in his discoveries, with the comfort and routine of settled domesticity. A big part of this, perhaps the main part, is Madame Maigret’s amazingly good bourgeois cooking. (There’s no fictional character whose food I would rather ...”

“... of Independence had called ‘merciless Indian Savages’. ‘When this is all over,’ Cofer Black, Bush’s chief counterterrorist adviser, assured his boss, ‘the bad guys are going to have flies walking across their eyeballs.’ The mood was infectious among the personnel in charge of exterminating the brutes. The Atlantic’s Robert Kaplan ...”