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“... Conrad Black is not the only tycoon to have dreamed of global domination while buying and selling newspapers, and he is not the only tycoon to have had people fawning over him on the way up and shunning him on the way down; he is not the only tycoon to have lived large, issued writs and faced criminal charges; but he is the only tycoon with a wholly distinctive prose style ...”

“... were pledged to obstruct the war effort. Among other things, they used to go about in the black-out attaching ‘sticky back’ notices to lamp-posts, telephone kiosks and so on. The notices informed passers-by that the war was a Jews’ war. Parties of illicit bill-stickers would emerge in pairs from Anna Wolkoff’s flat, all of them thoroughly au ...”

“... were at blood feud. The cover of The File on H shows three young peasants in their Sunday best – black from head to foot. They look threatening all right, but any photography buff will recognise one of August Sanders’s most frequently reproduced images. These young men are Germans. They are not going to shoot anyone, because that was not the tribal custom ...”

“... description of the place, and particularly by certain writings of Thomas Hardy, Evelyn Waugh and Max Beerbohm, we know exactly what Oxford will be: unearthly bliss in the moment, and the object of sweet, aching nostalgia ever after.’ The novel appears to be about to deflate this notion of Oxford, treating it sceptically, ironically, with the distances and ...”

“... other people is incorrigible, indeed obsessional. In his review of David Cecil’s biography of Max Beerbohm Malcolm Muggeridge allowed it to be a graceful job of work, but said it missed the real point about Beerbohm and his lifestyle, which was that he concealed his Jewish origins and was a crypto-homosexual. Of course! Something must explain Beerbohm ...”

“... Something about the British press attracts Canadians. In the 1920s Max Aitken bought the Daily and Sunday Express, turned them into successful popular papers and became Lord Beaverbrook in the process. In the 1950s Roy Thomson bought Kemsley Newspapers, added the Times to his empire in 1966, and was similarly rewarded with a seat in the House of Lords ...”

“... Art, Rose Wylie: Quack Quack and now Basquiat: Boom for Real have brought the work of queer, black, elderly and female artists into mainstream exhibitions. Of course, Jean-Michel Basquiat is a star – it happened more or less instantly after his move from street graffiti to painting in 1981 – yet the current retrospective at the Barbican (until 28 ...”

“... Gareth Pugh’s Sycorax is the nearest to spectacle, dressed in a stiff funnel-necked ball-gown of black silk, embellished with heavy metal pendants. The shops compete, naturally, but advantages are bestowed on those with better faces (Max Mara profits unfairly from its double-storied glass and iron façade) while internal ...”

“... still hear him softly snoring through the night, see him at dawn climb down the ladder: big gut black underpants, put on his sweat- shirt, baseball hat, get into jeans & trainers, zip up his plastic holdall, rub his stubbled face with both his hands ready for the journey. I’ll have a wash in Russia he said. I wished him the best of British. He replied ...”

“... family’. The Travers family is scattered in a stereotypically Californian way. The son, Max, is doing community service after the police found a gun in the glove compartment of the car he was driving. Max had told the police that he wanted to kill himself. The daughter, Olivia, has come back from a school trip to ...”

“... only the English edition that it fails to give the pagination of the German one. When Geach and Black’s volume of translations first came out in 1952, there existed hardly anything of Frege’s in English save his Foundations of Arithmetic. Moreover, even for readers of German, his other books were almost inaccessible, and his articles available only in ...”

“... who believed in his country right or wrong even when that country became the embodiment of evil. Max Planck is famous to this day for his introduction of the quantum theory. He was born in 1858 in Kiel, which was then part of Denmark. One of his formative memories was the triumphant entry in 1864 of Bismarck’s Prussian troops, which recovered the province ...”

“... misremembering or paraphrasing a line of Virginia Woolf’s about Henry James) grew out of D.T. Max’s post-mortem profile of Wallace for the New Yorker, and is very much the version of his life as seen from Times Square. ‘Every story has a beginning and this is David Wallace’s’ is Max’s first sentence. It’s a ...”

“... that crime fiction is only crime fiction. The Lemur, his third book under the pen name Benjamin Black, is a slim, efficient novel, elegantly done as such things go, in which literary pretensions are largely resisted and the proper conventions observed. There is the murder. There is the Beretta. There are multiple suspects. There is the CIA connection. There ...”

“... His early achievements in logic and mathematics became known to the British mathematician Max Newman, and to the great John von Neumann in Princeton. He already speculated simultaneously on the foundations of mathematics, in Hilbert’s and Gödel’s sense, and on the conceivable capacities and limits of computing machines, and this combination of ...”