“... Like many other plutocrats who are now remembered as great collectors, J. Paul Getty began acquiring works of art in a serious way when he began to die – that is to say, in his forties (he was born in 1892), which is when most of us start thinking up ways of not thinking about mortality. He bought glamorous pieces of French furniture and decorative art, a field in which it is relatively easy to buy reliable advice ...”

“... your money and get to watch a tearful reconciliation between father and son, mother and daughter, Paul and Yoko, whatever’s going on that particular Saturday night. But it doesn’t play like that back out in the world, on the sidewalk, opening your umbrella as you walk out from under the shelter of the marquee. I’m staying at a hotel in the Village, the ...”

“... the Saviour of the World: an Italian ‘Vicar of Christ’ with papal tiara, sitting on the Seven Hills of Rome, who personified the Antichrist condemned in Holy Scripture. Exploring words and their meanings shows what a complicated business this Reformation was. ‘Protestants’ did not succeed as they had hoped in replacing the pope’s church with a ...”

“... give way to arguments of power.’ Robert Graves writes in his autobiography that, back in the hills of Harlech, he found himself ‘still mentally and nervously organised for war’, automatically sizing up the landscape for places to site a Lewis-gun and provide cover for his rifle-grenade section. Contemporaries similarly saw in Lewis a man shaped, or ...”

“... speed – the car has passed’) shows a spray of pink-tinged dust on an empty white road, green hills, blue skies, gestures of atmospheric disturbances.In his biography of Ferrari, published in Italy in 2022 and which he has now translated into English, Luca Dal Monte writes that ‘from his father young Enzo learned the importance … of “diligently ...”

“... denounce you as the Antichrist,’ he shouted, in the European Parliament, at Pope John Paul II. ‘Harlot’ was also a favourite, but this was rarely applied to an actual woman, being reserved for the Church of Rome. The same applied to ‘whore’, as in, ‘of Babylon’. The purity, in this uncracked patriarchy, of their own women, was a ...”

“... were invited to join Unit One, a group of painters, sculptors and architects brought together by Paul Nash to stand for ‘a truly contemporary spirit’ that would, he wrote in the Times, definitively bring together abstraction and Surrealism. But Maclean suggests that the decade’s innovation had already begun with the pink alabaster of Hepworth’s ...”

“... considered them bothersome rather than dangerous. Matt, their ninth child, announced that he was Paul McCartney and that his moods controlled the weather. Peter, their tenth child, said that he was a secret agent who worked for Queen Elizabeth. Brian, their fourth child, seemed well enough until, aged 22, he shot and killed his girlfriend, then himself. None ...”

“... similar jobs to men: none of this is true of the Bahun culture. In Brahmin culture, whether in the hills or towns, women are part of the hierarchical system, impure and inferior, given no control of money, often badly beaten, often carrying huge loads while their husbands walk ahead of them carrying little. This attitude to women affects the family at a ...”

“... like some lesser piece of Frederic Raphael university-and-after, not Colegate territory at all. Paul Bowles’s short stories concentrate almost entirely on sense of place, or at least of place dominating character and directing it. Bowles has lived for many years in Tangier, and most of the stories are set there. The opening piece, ‘Midnight Mass’, is ...”

“... terse lyricism, and worldly wisdom about the workings of power, bring to mind the short stories of Paul Bowles and Deborah Eisenberg. Remarkably for a writer of her generation (she was born in 1962), Egan seemed like an expatriate, looking back with biting irony at her fellow Americans and their insufficiently examined expectations of wealth, comfort, beauty ...”

“... Alcohol, Cocaine, Peyote, Morphine and Ether (1932). Walter Benjamin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre and Antonin Artaud all gave it a try. In her memoirs Simone de Beauvoir described Sartre being haunted by visions of scuttling crabs for days after his experiment, but Jay writes that Sartre admitted to having first seen the crabs years before trying ...”

“... how difficult it was to deploy tanks in narrow valleys; the lethal exposure created by ascending hills; the terror of being half-interred in a bunker, strafed by fighter-bombers without adequate air cover or flak defence; as well as the age-old military adage that no plan survives contact.The Savage Storm is humane and unflinching, and as befits a tragedy ...”

“... in the closing paragraph of the book. It is July 1921; the freedom-fighters, bivouacked out on the hills, suddenly and disbelievingly hear of the Truce, which will soon lead to the Treaty. The conclusion is masterly, not least for the children’s jingle which O’Malley adds as a kind of epiphany at the end – recalling the way his Mayo nurse used to end her ...”

“... a gap. It’s like being inside a double bowl – the glass dome, then the city ringed by hills. A line of Lowell’s – ‘this sweet volcanic cone’ – comes to mind, except it’s not sweet inside the cone, because somewhere in that darkness, out there on the slopes of Divis, are buried the bodies of more than twenty IRA victims. Now the ...”