“... performed Eclairs sur l’ audelá.The most interesting of the single-work chapters is by Richard Steinitz on Des canyons aux étoiles, possibly because the author’s enthusiasm is tempered by doubts about the work’s total impact. ‘One has to accept,’ Steinitz says, ‘that the nature of his faith reduces the possibilities of dramatic ...”

“... swirl of colours: old gold, brown, magenta, blue. Beneath her grave lectorial face was a sharply white jabot, itself the centre of the picture around which the colours played. These were sombre: Redon was concentrating unfrivolously on his wife just as she was concentrating on her book. And then, suddenly, I saw where he had signed his homage: in tiny ...”

“... be a godfather to Private Eye, as satire and exultant disrespect returned to Britain in the 1960s. Richard Ingrams and Peter Cook – three decades younger – let him guest-edit a gorgeous special number on the Profumo scandal in 1963, in which, among other scoops, he drove Whitehall to apoplectic fury by printing the name of Sir Dick ...”

“... to restore the rule of fathers everywhere; to undo the psychic castration suffered by straight white men at the hands of invading immigrants, feminist women, ‘woke’ mobs, DEI initiatives and the democratic presumption of equality.In fact, the unconscious never left the scene. Psychoanalysis tells us that it is the unconscious that sets the scene. What ...”

“... man, whose ‘Artistry’ is the aching reflex of an acute if delicate worldliness, focused on the white image of his commonplace, treacherous wife. ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ (‘poor brother Lippo’) makes this same self-betrayal mark with its dishonesties a stronger, more genial man, both relishing and distracted by the echoes of street songs which mockingly ...”

“... existentialist you ever saw’ and she lunched her way around Manhattan, becoming close to Richard Wright and his wife, Ellen (left-wing Americans who criticised their country in a way that made you love it more), before taking off for Vassar, then Chicago, California, Texas, New Orleans and New Mexico.She’d been told to look up Nelson Algren when ...”

“... But Ben-Gurion was adept at turning events to his advantage. When, in 1930, the British released a white paper that reinterpreted Balfour as a ‘dual and equal commitment to both Jews and Arabs’ most Zionists were furious. Ben-Gurion, however, took his colleagues to task for succumbing to panic: ‘Such hysterical mood swings are not to our credit and we ...”

“... the floor of a Dominican church. Among the gravestones was a particularly striking one in grey-white marble with pink and blue veins. Two helmets with slits for eyes faced each other, like a pair of beaky dolphins about, clangingly, to kiss: ‘Tomb Slab of an English Couple’, the label in Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum says. The couple were ...”

“... was ‘a call for a return to the 1950s’. The mock-arcadia of its ending, returning to the white picket fence of the opening but with everything slightly off, leaves us in little doubt that the dream and the nightmare inhabit each other. Jeffrey and Frank are two halves of a whole: MacLachlan’s boyish face sometimes flickers with dead-eyed ...”

“... and give readings there. After he moved to Princeton he visited the president and stayed in the White House, and, being so reserved and guarded, so conservative and respectable, was mentioned as a possible president for Germany once the war was over. In Los Angeles, where he moved in 1941 and lived until his return to Switzerland in 1952, Mann built a house ...”

“... sale is entitled Princess with Orchid). He is said to have retained his prewar habit of wearing white kid gloves even while presiding over huge camouflage workshops. Dunoyer de Ségonzac, another member of the French camouflage section, was known for still lifes featuring eggs, bottles and cabbages, but not distorted guitars of Picasso’s Cubist kind. Some ...”

“... dismal sight, barren and desolate. The sky would soon be crowded with aircraft, usually with red, white and blue roundels rather than black crosses. Occasionally they would sight an enemy strafing Allied artillery positions and give chase. Then they would return to base, have a second breakfast and a cigarette, and go back to bed. Subalterns in the trenches ...”

“... only a mild demur regarding the medical evidence) the judgment by the cultural theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic that ‘the immediate short-term harms of hate speech include rapid breathing, headaches, raised blood pressure, dizziness, rapid pulse rate, drug-taking, risk-taking behaviour and even suicide.’ He has to treat the nonsense ...”

“... there was a way of sending yourself into a trance. You had to imagine yourself entering a warm white fog. He tried this out, and the images came to him. ‘I would’ve removed her underpants or bottoms to the nightgown ... I would’ve told her to be quiet and uh, not say anything to anybody and threatened to her ... to say that I would kill her if she ...”

“... slimness of his boyish figure, the slenderness of the bare legs that protruded from his billowing white shorts, one of the legs folding back and resting on the other knee.’ As they left the café, Wilde asked Gide if he wanted the boy. Gide nervously said that he did. Wilde, having made the arrangements, laughed uproariously as his suspicions about Gide’s ...”