“... the Revolution was taking. He attempted to call its bluff by painting insurgent peons and thronged May Day meetings, enjoying the outrage the pictures caused. With Siqueiros and Xavier Guerrero he also founded the famously belligerent Sindicato (Union of Workers, Technicians, Painters and Sculptors), an early example of the syndicates, leagues and blocs that ...”

“... a tiny shoe; the man who drags his heels down to one side drags his spirit to one side, too, you may be sure. But observations of that kind are really pretty rudimentary. How often do human beings smell one another’s feet, and how subtle are the conclusions they draw from the odours that every pair of feet produces? Have you ever known a human who has ...”

“... as ex-President Giscard make ponderous remarks about immigrants having to ‘remember that they may have rights, but they have duties too’ in such a way as to suggest that immigrants are falling down on their duties in some unexplained way. But the key mechanism is PR: it forces Chirac to compete with Le Pen; Giscard with Chirac; even the Socialist ...”

“... for the new constitutional plans for South Africa with the gloomy conclusion that the conflict ‘may beexpected to tend gradually towards anarchy, in which the quality of life for everyone, black and white, wouldbe destroyed’. In such an event, he asks himself, would there be any relevance in the fact that Transkei was independent? Answer: scarcely ...”

“... a lover too often lest Special Claims Control squads accuse you of ‘cohabiting’. But you may well be living in conditions which would put even lovers off visiting you. Beatrix Campbell’s descriptions of the environments created by Planners who Knew that common people should live in jerry-built estates and shaky tower blocks will not surprise any ...”

“... building where my brother worked as a staff member. I had forgotten that it was the first of May, but the columns of the Forward building were completely draped in red and a large throng stood before the building listening to a speaker. We crossed the bridge to Brooklyn and a new area of New York revealed itself to me. It was less crowded, had almost no ...”

“... Metaphysical vogue which was popular in the academies, with archaic spelling and rhyme (‘I may waste my days no more/pining in spirituall warre’), and these clash disastrously with the burning guilts and desires which anxiously lurk beneath the poem’s surface, desperate to be confessed. It wasn’t until he met Williams in 1950 that he realised ...”

“... stepping into the fray as Docs’ Joshua, sums up the feeling best when he says here: ‘Hunter may be the reincarnation of Lono – the God returned after 1500 years of wandering like a lovesick child to save his people – and his beloved American Constitution ... He is your saviour and he is guardian of all you profess to hold dear. In his weirdness he ...”

“... contractual courtesy: a name, banished from the cover, tucked out of sight on the half-title. It may be a superstition, but the ghost is rarely represented in the gallery of photographs. There are no staged intimacies, arms around shoulders, triumphal gestures. Perhaps it would be too unnerving if we discovered that these sagas of thuggery and revenge were ...”

“... people like Luther, of course; but those who believe in the silencing of dissent, as More did, may well be silenced themselves, and we should shed no tears if their own unpleasant beliefs have had their revenge on them. And could More really not have been different? Other men have believed quite as strongly in God or gods without sending people of ...”

“... the one hand, and on the other, an art addressed to the commodity and its spectacularisation. It may not be going too far to view this as the delayed victory of those Constructivist and Dada tendencies which earlier challenged Modernism as part of what proved to be the historically premature revolution of the early 20th century. Shorn of the revolutionary ...”

“... problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on.Let us assume that, however it may have been done, it is done. Let us take it that the bridge is built and crossed, that we can put it out of our mind. We have left behind the territory in which we were. We are in the far territory, where we want to be.We haven’t yet got a glimpse of the far ...”

“... Palantir’s technology work? Even those at the company weren’t sure. When Obama announced in May 2011 that US special forces had tracked down and killed Osama bin Laden, employees at Palantir asked their bosses: was this us? What they got back was a nod and a wink and a ‘maybe’. That was enough to get the press speculating that the company’s AI ...”

“... his third bottle of wine of the night. The precise date of his death isn’t known, though it may well have been 22 February, when he was last seen at the Napier.Johnson was an avid reader of newspapers. Among the correspondents to whom he meticulously relayed news from the Kent Evening Post and the Sheerness Times Guardian were Hannah Arendt, Christa ...”

“... to live with her brother, Leo. Like Barney, she already knew she was gay: an early romance with May Bookstaver, ‘upright and a trifle brutal’, had convinced her of that. In France Stein began work on QED, a novel about Bookstaver, and she and Leo started buying up paintings – Cézanne, Renoir, Picasso, Matisse. ‘Cézanne gave me a new feeling about ...”