“... and asserting an imperial idea that once flourished in many places, but which now clings to the Rock of Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands and parts of the north-east counties of Ireland. The Gibraltar equivalent of Sir Joseph Cairns is a politician called Sir Joshua Hassan who believes that the Rock is indissolubly part of ...”

“... nowhere to be found. And so, this past summer, when I boarded a fast boat to Capri – that famous rock where Lenin and Adorno hiked, and where now those who can afford prices set for Russian oligarchs shop – I was not immune to the prospect that the good-looking captain in his tight white slacks might throw us to the sharks. I had decided that it is the ...”

“... again in the late 1950s and early 1960s. (This period, in which she became friends with John Cage, David Tudor and La Monte Young as well as George Maciunas and other Fluxus-affiliated artists, and became something of a conduit between New York and Tokyo’s experimental music and art scenes, is carefully surveyed in the exhibition.) The works of the early ...”

“... the up-do, the bouncing bob, the scrape-back and the Arkanfro, and has settled for a traditional, rock-solid, Oval Office quiff, the kind of hairstyle that looks like it might survive a nuclear winter. Is this what Joyce meant by metempsychosis – the transmigration of souls? Some, it turns out, have a further distance to migrate than others. One of ...”

“... in Beijing an unprecedented group of works of art (paintings, textiles, porcelain, even a great rock from the imperial gardens), as the tribute of one age of prosperity to another. It would be easy, too, to see some contemporary parallels: the high Qing was an era of the firmest possible central control over the lands of Islamic Central Asia and Tibet; its ...”

“... accepted Boeing’s tender for a massive new cargo aircraft for the United States Air Force, David Lodge would not have been able to write Paradise News. Instead, however, Lockheed got the contract, and Boeing were left with a redundant set of blueprints for the biggest furniture van never built. To save all that development money going to waste, they ...”

“... South Africa through a European-style industrial revolution compressed into twenty years. David Goldblatt (b.1930) began taking photographs in the gold-mining areas in his teens. Many of them, and the ones that followed, tell the story of South Africa’s labouring classes, predominantly black, in a world shaped by race laws and extractive ...”

“... Eighty-six people died in the Waco siege in April, including the ‘prophet’ David Koresh and 17 children fathered by him. David Leppard, a crime reporter with the Sunday Times Insight team who covered the Waco story, describes well and knowledgeably the appalling build-up of weapons in the compound of the Branch Davidians’ ranch and the information and assumptions that led the two law enforcement agencies involved – the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the FBI – to make a series of disastrous errors ...”

“... between performers and audience, with disgruntled folk-music lovers heckling throughout the rock ‘n’ roll sets. ‘He wants shooting,’ fulminates an angry fan in the unreleased film of the tour, Eat the document. But Dylan thrived on exactly this kind of hostility. The most thrilling single moment of his musical career is probably still the ...”

“... tradition of early 20th-century Modern than the cast sculptures (with the startling exception of Rock-Drill). Among these carvings are the doves, of around 1915, which were Epstein’s shot at Brancusi’s kind of abstraction and simplification, and a whole string of allegorical figures. Some owe more than others to his study of non-European ...”

“... 2004 election were pre-planned (exit polls, steward training, the building of a stage for a rock concert in the main square, the erection of six hundred tents), but ‘then so was the fraud that led to them.’ He accepts that Western NGOs advised and helped to organise the protests, but why not? The West was promoting its democratic values, for which ...”

“... watched him playing piano on a bare stage in Cambridge directing a performance of The cradle will rock. In his music-theatre Bernstein followed Blitzstein’s example, greatly echoing the score of Freedom Morning ... for his On the Town of 1944. In his handling of his sexual life. Bernstein also built on Blitzstein’s model, even marrying, as Blitzstein did ...”

“... Caesar’s Death’ makes an ‘utterly Brechtian point’ and that Blitzstein’s The cradle will rock is ‘largely influenced by The Threepenny Opera’. In assessing musical works, Mr Sanders relies on the free play of personal taste and received opinion. The former either lends a semblance of individuality to the latter or in its absence becomes the sole ...”

“... their way, not ours. The prince of this brave new world – and the closest Nips has to a resident rock star – is Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google’s DeepMind, best known for having taught an algorithm (AlphaGo) to play the fearsomely demanding game of Go better than any human being has ever managed.* Hassabis is here to talk about his latest ...”

“... a degeneration, Mannerism to Modernism’s High Renaissance, rococo to its baroque (or indeed glam rock to its Beatles). This is the Modernism which flew kites higher in the sky than had ever seemed possible, and the Post-Modernism which cut the strings. The elements which are prefiguratively Post-Modern in Brecht – the use of mosaic and mixed media ...”