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“... State Hospital for the Criminally Insane with a copy of Alexandre Dumas’s Grand dictionnaire de cuisine open on his chest. Lecter was incarcerated for having murdered nine people ‘that we know about’, and having crippled two others, one of whom (of whom more later) was permanently attached to a respirator in Baltimore. Dr Lecter was being visited by ...”

“... No sympathy need be wasted on Duckworth, who was on to a good thing. Three Weeks, the succès de scandale of his 1907 list, stemmed from a liaison Mrs Glyn had been enjoying with a young Guards officer, Lord Alistair Innes Ker, whom she regarded as ‘emotionally sound asleep’. She had ended it because, as her grandmother had insisted, adultery was a ...”

“... A Greek translation was posted on the paper’s website. Syriza’s leader, Alexis Tsipras (‘the man who has everyone quaking in his boots’), couldn’t have dreamed up a better election-day ruse. Bild is Germany’s bestselling newspaper, and according to the latest ABC figures, it has the highest circulation of any publication in Europe: 2.67 million ...”

“... Jean-Luc Godard offers to shoot a collaborationist film. The title of the story, ‘I Am a Young Man Alone’, expressed its author’s predicament. Two decades after the end of the war, at the height of its trente glorieuses, France had moved on, but Modiano, the son of a Jewish businessman who had made his living on the black market during the Occupation ...”

“... and flow of water was essential to medieval understandings of time. As Chaucer put it in ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, ‘time wol nat abide/Fro day to night it changeth as the tide.’ When he wrote those words, a mechanical clock was being built at the abbey in St Albans: it showed the time, the position of the stars and the state of the tides at London ...”

“... guns or not. Fianna Fail was ‘a slightly constitutional party’, Sean Lemass, who succeeded de Valera as party leader in 1959, declared in 1928. Fine Gael, on the other hand, respected law and order. Its members were richer than us. Solicitors, big shopkeepers and big farmers were all Fine Gael. Secretly, we believed, they were pro-British, not as Irish ...”

“... In 1890, the neo-Impressionist Paul Signac offered to paint Félix Fénéon, the very coiner, four years previously, of the term ‘neo-Impressionist’. The critic-subject responded with modest evasiveness, and then a proviso: ‘I will express only one opinion: effigy absolutely full-face – do you agree?’ Signac did not agree ...”

“... of running dry. Even so, the simultaneous appearance of two studies of Louis from Les Editions de Minuit is a little surprising: did the right hand know what the left hand was publishing? What is more, both books are concerned with the King’s public image, rather than his policies or his private life. One book deals with court festivals, the other with ...”

“... out of a sack into a hopper to join St Matthew’s angel, St Mark’s lion, St Luke’s ox and St Paul with his sword. They are ground into the pure flour of hope, faith and love, scooped up and bagged by Erasmus the miller under the supervision of the dove of the Holy Ghost and handed on to Luther the baker, bent over his kneading tub. The Church hierarchy ...”

“... She is a CIA bigwig responding to a senator’s aide who is sure the agency has sent an innocent man off to an unnamed North African country for questioning. Or for pointless violence and humiliation, since nobody really believes he knows anything. This is a decent liberal movie caught up itself in the double-think of the War on Terror. I’m sure the writer ...”

“... Saatchi’s taste is eclectic. It’s not all Goldsmiths’: the 35 artists are no more than one man’s pleasure – and one woman’s duty. No one could credibly admire all these 35 varied artists or admire them equally: 35 bursts of unqualified enthusiasm would sound ridiculous. On the other hand, clear discriminations are clearly out. So a non-judgmental ...”

“... Last year, my father-in-law died. He was a complicated, difficult, intelligent man; the obituary-ese would be ‘colourful’. On occasion, when he was alive, I wanted him to go to hell. But when I sat at his deathbed, and looked at the body from which life had ebbed, I couldn’t help marvelling at the longevity, persistence and garish exuberance of the concept of the afterlife ...”

“... So characteristic of Paul Muldoon’s poetry as to be almost a hallmark is the moment, unnerving and exciting in about equal measures, when his speaker is suddenly revealed to himself as someone else. The whole world expands and changes in ‘Cass and Me’ when, as a boy, he climbs on the older Cass’s shoulders, and they lean out                across the yard As a giant would across the world ...”

“... and to be a spectator to the disgusting superpower aggression that was levelling ‘every work of man in Vietnam’ (General LeMay, speaking approvingly) as well as reducing its population by a million or two. The clear lineal descent of this policy from Japanese and French imperialism, the relentless campaign of lying and falsification by which it was ...”

“... finds him and a woman in a tableau he takes to be charged with erotic humiliation: ‘A young man, wearing only underpants, was kneeling before a young, fully dressed woman … The girl tossed her head, and her hair swung softly around her; she gave him such a look of contempt, while his son trembled in his abject state.’ Armand manages to leave the ...”