“... Perhaps I am reading in – reading back – too much of the later Goya into Floridablanca, which may just be a young professional’s slightly over-reaching bid for fame. Scholars for the most part advise people like me to avoid ‘seeing X in the light of Y’ too readily where Goya is concerned (Xavier Bray’s meticulous catalogue is typical): they are ...”

“... the largest place in Brooks County but still a one-horse town. The Dairy Queen burned down in May and the Walmart closed in July. Falfurrias once had a reputation as a hub for illegal gambling but this summer the gaming houses were raided and shut down. The town seems abandoned, apart from a border patrol station and a detention centre. The United States ...”

“... in their predictions at the last general election. Turnout, and the age profile of those who vote, may prove decisive. The Scottish electorate is, moreover, highly volatile, as recent results have shown. In the 2010 general election, Labour had 41 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats, the SNP six. In 2015, the SNP took 56 seats, and Labour a single ...”

“... to an orchestra, with strings, brass, percussion and more. That the sound has different components may not be a problem for Dehaene – it might be seen as one item. But suppose that I single out the brass section for particular attention. Given what Dehaene says about delays, it should now sound as if it were a note or two behind the rest of the orchestra. My ...”

“... was in transit, released from the Cathedral Works but not yet installed in its new location. On 14 May 1504, at 8 p.m., the David, upright in a cart, began to be rolled from the cathedral towards the seat of government, pushed over 14 greased logs by more than forty men. The process took four days, requiring that the statue be guarded at night – ‘on ...”

“... his ears’. Elsewhere Grigson describes one of the first chimpanzees in England, which arrived in May 1698 and was exhibited at Moncrief’s coffeehouse in Threadneedle Street, where it soon died. It was reported that the ‘monster’ came from ‘Angola in Africk, and was sold to the Captain amongst a parcel of slaves’. Slaves surface with some frequency ...”

“... in first. ‘Downhill begins this year,’ he announced with grim satisfaction in 1966. Even this may have been a slip, allowing the possibility of there having been an ‘up’ from which to come down. Usually his defences were in place in advance: ‘All is I suppose as well as can be expected by one with my powers of expectation.’ Thus armoured, he could ...”

“... or determinist version of the past’. Where did Attlee’s socialism come from? Unlikely as it may seem, Bew argues convincingly that it came from America, from the futuristic utopian fiction of Edward Bellamy, author of Looking Backward (1887). In Bellamy’s novel a resident of late 19th-century Boston is hypnotised and doesn’t wake up until the year ...”

“... the usual chatter and country music that were staples of the show, and in that furnace blast of a May morning in south central Texas – Christopher read aloud, first in German, then in his own English translation, Goethe’s ‘Night Thoughts’ of 1781: Stars, you are unfortunate, I pity you, Beautiful as you are, shining in your glory, Who guide seafaring ...”

“... so that even in the course of a single exhibition, like the one currently at Tate Modern (until 6 May), we begin to feel that we too are sitting down at the old kitchen table for our morning coffee. ‘Dining Room in the Country’ (1913) Intimacy (Bonnard and Vuillard were both thought of as intimistes by contemporaries) has a peculiar relationship to ...”

“... as a hostile remark. His mouth stayed closed when he smiled because he was concentrating. You may not have heard of him, but for maybe a decade and a half starting in the mid-1970s no one in the motion picture business was more focused than Michael Ovitz. ‘Mike’ from the San Fernando Valley was an incessant, soft-spoken maker of order and system, a ...”

“... in many guises, some of them unreliable. (He hints, too, at the allure of parade uniforms, which may have been a source of pride to new regulars before they exchanged them for combat dress.)The silent ‘characters’ in Mimesis are nearly always distanced, and intent on laying their operations bare (‘I am an actor, that is a camera’). Yet once we’re ...”

“... fiction – it’s something that can easily be lost. Our first encounter with an alien species may be one in which we feel acutely embarrassed by our decline.‘The Machine in Shaft Ten’, published in New Worlds in 1972 under the pseudonym Joyce Churchill, takes a similarly bleak view of our place in the universe. A vast machine is discovered at the ...”

“... the shock of death and the shock of happiness. Yves claims to have inherited a family greeting: ‘May your death come as a shock to you.’ He presents it as an act of well-wishing, although it sounds menacing when he says it. The shock of happiness is Tommy’s idea. In the Uber from Frank’s place, he launches into a three-page monologue on the nature of ...”

“... in Moore’s titles tends to mean ‘someone who is only just still a wife, and whom betrayal may free’. It has that sense in his last novel, The Magician’s Wife (1997), in which the heroine (whose voice often seems to belong to the 1970s rather than the 1850s in which the book is set) eventually betrays her magician husband. He is supposed to stage a ...”