“... This scenario mostly applies to the non-vulnerable missing – that’s to say, people who may deliberately go missing for reasons of their own. It applies less to the unmissed, or to vulnerables whose disappearance is much more sinister. There is no big deal, for them, in turning away from the documents of the past. For runaways and abuse victims and ...”

“... most dangerous room’ while in ‘A Nocturnal Breakfast’ he announces: ‘I think this may be/The last ever breakfast.’ The vein of comic surrealism which this exploits is, at times, similar to Monty Python. Like the best of Python, Woodward’s poems can be eerily and blackly humorous: like the worst of Python they can be fey and palely ...”

“... with several pints of lager at Egan’s in Kilkee. And these forgivable excesses, while they may not have caused her death, were directly responsible for the heavy air inside the room she was waked in and the ‘bad form’ Nora called it when the requiems had to be moved up a day and a perfectly enjoyable wake foreshortened by the misbehaviour of Mrs ...”

“... we no longer admired. I really think that if a genius uses daguerreotype as it should be used, he may reach heights we have no idea of. Above all when you study these engravings, which have exhausted every painter’s admiration for them, you feel how right Poussin was to say: ‘set beside the classical artists Raphael is an ass.’ Up till now this ...”

“... he fell in love with the stepmother of the friend with whom he had gone off to enlist. Although he may never have known her real age, the already twice married Cissy Pascal was, at 49, 18 years older than Chandler and barely younger than his mother, another fading beauty who never revealed her birth date. Herself a member of the Pascal household, Florence ...”

“... is not in The Shameful Life, which tends to play down whatever conventional sex life Dalí may have had). Otherwise, ‘a little voyeurism, accompanied by masturbation, is quite enough.’ It sounds like an understandable preference for a light lunch. In 1922 Dalí obtained a place to study art at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, but he ...”

“... is falling. Clutching a little case,He walks out briskly to infect a cityWhose terrible future may have just arrived.The screening took place in the Molenbeek warehouse where a group of architects make space for spontaneous performances, dance and discussions. ‘What we try to do,’ they told me, ‘is dissolve boundaries.’ Vaes’s vision of London ...”

“... and later to Nicaragua, where they were met by Sandinistas. Their daughter, Manuela, was born in May 1984. The years between then and 1991, when Escobar agreed to a truce with the government, were among the most violent in Colombia’s history, with one inconceivable event following another. On 6 November 1985, members of a guerrilla movement associated with ...”

“... and to be organised collectively rather than at the level of the individual. ‘Disadvantage may indeed be an excuse,’ she wrote. ‘It is not, however, an intellectual position.’ As soon as she finished it, Nochlin knew that she had written something significant, though years later – on one of many occasions when she revisited the essay – she ...”

“... in the museum they allow light to stream in.A curatorial delegation arrived in New York in May 1975 for the first round of acquisitions. They bought Jackson Pollock’s Mural on Indian Red Ground; several Picassos, including Open Window on the Rue de Penthièvre in Paris; and de Kooning’s Light in August. In the months that followed, these were ...”

“... and baked onstage, as if the real-time-ness of work were a new existential value. David Storey may have been, even in a heavily contested field, the most inhibited British writer of his generation. He was born in 1933 and grew up in Wakefield, in a family that felt work was destiny and everything else was showing off. His father worked in a coal mine but ...”

“... not in jail – these were not the things we meant by “life” when we started. I mean, they may have happened, but not on purpose.’ Aids was killing her friends, ‘the biggest events in people’s lives [were] receiving cakes at meetings for how many years they’ve been sober’, the political gains of the 1960s were slipping away, artists were ...”

“... with The Sportswriter, meaning that no event need be skipped. Alec, dancing with his ex-wife, may feel that ‘fifteen years are nothing,’ but fifteen years in these pages is long enough to contain a long prison sentence, subsequent rehabilitation and eventually the training required to answer phones as a Samaritan. It’s long enough for a mod to ...”

“... his best works, ‘Children of the Working Class’ (1972). The poem attends to those ‘whom you may never see’, who are ‘locked in Taunton State Hospital and other peon work farms/drudge from morning until night, abandoned within destitute crevices/ odd clothes’, and ends:Yes life was hard for them, much more hard than for any bloated millionaire, who ...”

“... to the story of the Corinthian Maid and the invention of painting in antiquity (a motif Goya may have derived from the Scottish artist David Allan, one of whose paintings was on board the frigate The Westmoreland when it was captured by French warships in 1779, its contents dispersed in Spain).In 1786, Carlos III appointed Goya a court painter. The ...”