“... supporting a distinctive race or community, is restricted’ [emphasis added] – which actually means that it is forbidden, because there are no provisions for exceptions. That still left in place pre-existing foundations, allowing a dwindling number of Armenian and Greek churches as well as synagogues and schools to keep going, but in 1974 new legislation ...”

“... are life-enhancing or give pleasure, but that they are a test of the health of a society. Bad art means bad lives are being lived. Good policies will be known by the art they encourage. The works C.R. Ashbee is remembered for – a couple of original if slightly awkward houses in Chelsea, some pretty silver and jewellery of an almost Art Nouveau ...”

“... sentenced 13 of them to death. The ‘boss’, a powerful Indonesian Chinese businessman known as David Wong, was arrested in Indonesia and sent to prison for six years. Wong is by no means the only boss. Sony Wei, the leader of the pirates who hijacked the Chang Sheng, spoke, in the course of his testimony, of working for ...”

“... education legislation last year, ‘If challenging the allegedly oppressive liberal cultural elite means insisting on climate change sceptics being appointed to senior academic positions regardless of their attitudes to evidence and reasoned debate, then our universities and their reputation are, indeed, at risk.’ Quite. The university isn’t, and ...”

“... adequate to the mass annihilation seems to fail. Every effort to stabilise recollection by means of language comes too late – too late for those who were its victims, too late for the event itself.’ How does one stabilise such a recollection? Even today, fifty years later, the historians’ question can hardly be separated from the travails of the ...”

“... of the towns. It has created enormous cities. Capitalism has agglomerated population, centralised means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. Capitalism has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. Capitalism has been the first to show what man’s activity can ...”

“... of a solution, by fleshing out the original makers of the myth – Joe and Rose Kennedy. David Nasaw’s The Patriarch is a comprehensive account of Joseph Kennedy’s ascent from lace-curtain respectability to extraordinary wealth and political influence, followed by exile to the margins and vicarious achievement through his sons. Nasaw shows that ...”

“... up at the right place. And sometimes it’s got a funny joke name and you don’t know what it means: you’ve got to be at Toggers or something. I hated all that. But I had a very nice housemaster – George Lyttelton of the dreaded Letters – who allowed me to educate myself. He thought it was rather amusing that I was reading Proust, though he didn’t ...”

“... in whose company he ‘could drop his guard’. Cows were early subjects – he told his friend David Wojnarowicz that he’d taken a photo of them from a great distance when he was first experimenting: ‘The cows were like a hundred feet away. I mean, three little black dots … but I knew it was cows in a field.’ As an adult, he took some striking ...”

“... Bildungsroman, the life and impressions of one young man: he even gets born with a caul on him, as David Copperfield did. Serge, however, attracts no sympathy or empathy or whatever from his creator: he’s a convergence, or rather an area of concentration, where ideas, images, words, preoccupations gather and regroup. The book is split into four main ...”

“... filed into the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock to hear a piano recital by the young virtuoso David Tudor. That they should be here, tucked away in the Catskills, was already extraordinary. The Maverick is more hermitage than concert hall: a wooden, barn-like structure, set – in 1952 at least – in several acres of woodland. Water Music by John Cage, a ...”

“... and he would return to the displacement over and over (and over) in his fiction. Here are the boy David Kern’s parents, George and Elsie, fighting about it in the early story ‘Pigeon Feathers’: Mother’s anger touched David’s face; his cheeks burned guiltily. Just by staying in the living room he associated ...”

“... dreamed up much of the look, the attitude and the lyrics, though not the sound. A full year before David Bowie adopted the same hair style, Westwood had her hair bleached blonde and cut ‘coupe-sauvage’ style: tufty, asymmetrical and barmy-looking. She went to America and dressed the New York Dolls. Together, she and McLaren assembled the Sex Pistols, whom ...”

“... as precious stones.’ The ambition is breathtaking, its objects less so. I would like to believe David Erdman that even Pitt guiding Behemoth is meant as Satanic allegory, with its naked British hero putting, as always, an angelic face on Chaos and Non-Entity. But I have my doubts. Perhaps the verdict of time on the Pitt and Nelson pictures – the one, to ...”

“... for experimental music, electronic music in particular. ‘Only through the use of electrical means,’ he writes, ‘may important advances in the exploration of sound be made’: ‘American music will be enlivened and enriched by such exploration and use of new musical materials. These can best be brought about through the co-operation of scientists ...”