“... together, cutting out paper shapes and placing them in arbitrary arrangements of blue, grey and black. But they had differing interpretations of the irrationality demanded by Dada. Arp claimed his famous torn paper collages were ‘governed by the laws of chance’ – laws exerted when in frustration he tore up a failed drawing and dropped the pieces on ...”

“... in the middle of light pedestrian traffic on Fifth Avenue. Neatly dressed in a suit and shiny black shoes, with a very slight smile, Grosz looks as though he’s conquering New York, as he did Berlin. His autobiography had appeared two years before, celebrated by Edmund Wilson in the New Yorker, who compared Grosz’s new Cape Cod paintings to ...”

“... as ‘going home’. It seemed so easy when music did it: who wouldn’t want to swat away those black accidentals and come back to sunny C major? These satisfying resolutions are sometimes called ‘perfect cadences’; there is a lovely subspecies called the ‘English cadence’, used often by composers like Tallis and Byrd, in which, just before the ...”

“... Angeles, apparently also German, who was present at Weill’s funeral as the enigmatic mistress in black. But most of the extra-marital affairs were Lenya’s. The first one serious and lasting enough to come to Weill’s attention was with an Austrian singer, Otto Pasetti. Lenya met him in 1932 and lived, i.e. travelled, with him throughout 1934. Reading the ...”

“... people to vote for him to get rid of her, and Meloni tweeting a video that appeared to show a black man sexually assaulting a white woman in Piacenza – and in fact the total number cast for right-wing parties was a hundred thousand fewer than four years ago. Turnout, which has been in continual decline since 2006, was down eight points to a record low ...”

“... hand, were ruled by the more paternalistic Colonial Office. Nyasaland was obviously headed for black majority rule at some point in the future; Northern Rhodesia was supposed to be making for a form of ‘multiracial partnership’. (It all depended on how many whites lived there – that is, whether there were enough to keep the blacks down.) Philip ...”

“... the frontier of success. It was the view that persuaded Eddie to invest, though he had to max out all his credit cards in the process. Ever since he arrived in the country he had dreamed of a place like this. He started out as a driver in a car service. Within a few years he ran the firm. ‘The Americans would work eight-hour days. Eight-hour ...”

“... this.’ When he got the job of literary editor he gave himself the task of reading an essay by Max Beerbohm before breakfast every day. AH: But you were still writing for the TLS all this time? FW: Yes, though I stopped with a thud when Alan Pryce-Jones left and Arthur Crook came. I think I was too associated in his mind with the frivolity of the ...”

“... miles out of Woodstock in the rural hamlet of Bethel (population 2700). The property was owned by Max Yasgur, a 49-year-old dairy farmer born to Russian Jewish immigrants. Yasgur and his wife, Miriam, had six hundred acres and a large herd of Guernsey cows. They struck a deal with Woodstock Ventures – $50,000 for the loan of the land, according to Rolling ...”

“... tail is darker, greenish and emerges from a dark blue body that possesses a fourth head, charcoal-black and ugly as a troll’s. There are allusions here to the Ouroboros – the snake that eats its tail, a common motif in alchemical art, signifying the union of opposites – and to the process by which the philosopher’s stone was supposed to be ...”

“... his village about a dream in which the dead of battle rise from their makeshift graves in a great black cloud and walk the roads and byways of France. (A still photograph from the film, showing a lone soldier among a field of crosses receding without end to the horizon, forms the book’s dust-jacket.) The risen soldiers see how little their sacrifice has ...”

“... since come out as trans.) Apocalypse World (2010) adopts a dystopian setting like that of the Mad Max films. Creators have since adopted its dice-based rule set – simpler than the elaborate system of D&D – for other milieux, from Monsterhearts, a high-school romance-horror hybrid (think Buffy the Vampire Slayer) to Pasión de las Pasiones (think ...”

“... a Hampshire house so haunted it was knocked down. He gives a deft sketch of the original Woman in Black: Maria Manning, the Lady Macbeth of Bermondsey, who was sent to the gallows in a black dress and long gloves for killing her lover and burying him under the kitchen floor (‘I never liked him and I beat his skull with a ...”

“... real. The book’s ostensible sumptuousness is now revealed as a strength. On page 193 there is a black-and-white reproduction of a little watercolour dating from 1812 showing ‘Princess Schwarzenburg Reading in the Austrian Embassy, Paris’. Praz tells you that the original watercolour is one of a pair now kept in the confiscated Schwarzenburg castle of ...”

“... In this circle, or set of interlocking circles, the names of Rudolf Slansky, Ehrlich and Alter, Max Schachtman, Andres Nin, Amadeo Bordiga and John Dewey are, still, names with which to puncture an argument, break up a friendship, revise an article or inaugurate a new and daring small magazine. Keywords include ...”