“... of my father’s. Dad had invested in Muntz TV, the first streamlined seventeen-tube low-cost black and white model, which Muntz began selling in 1947. In 1950 my sister, Jane, and I visited Muntz at home in Beverly Hills and encountered for the only time in our lives a TV at the bottom of a swimming pool. The controls were at the pool’s edge. You chose ...”

“... for posterity. Typically, the speculation shadows the spirit of the age. In 1904, influenced by Max Nordau’s theories of racial degeneration, A.C. Benson ascribed the pervasive Tennysonian gloom to a strain of ‘dark Southern blood’ tainting the predominantly Scandinavian stock of the family. In 1923, Harold Nicolson, persuaded by Strachey’s sardonic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... outside the old Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street, walking down to the entrance of the big black palace, taking the lift up to the second floor, and bursting into the editor’s office just as the morning conference was about to begin. After explaining the circumstances to the astonished assembly, I intended to invite the editor to move over, plonk ...”

“... and stamping on licentious tarantulas hidden up petticoats. The performance was accessorised with black lace mantilla, castanets and theatrical displays of haughtiness or languor. It had little to do with prevailing French-Italian styles and certainly surprised the habitués of the London theatre. Planted supporters got the applause going, but even as she was ...”

“... in courtrooms: a claim proved to be false within a matter of days. There was also a certain black comedy in the fact that the girl who had lied about being a lawyer should be attacked two days later, in the same papers, by Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard professor of law, who happened to be visiting Australia. I met Jill Kitson on the morning his article ...”

“... routinely castrate ‘Gentiles’ who hang around their women). Enter a lone rider, dressed in black, packing two black Colt pistols by his side. His name is ‘Lassiter’. The stranger faces down Tull and his men and rescues Bern Venters from the Mormon lash. With Lassiter an archetype was born: the lone-wolf cowboy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”