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“... like the autobiography of, say, Simone de Beauvoir. If you read it expecting anything very frank or deep or sustained, you will find it, as I did to begin with, disappointing. But unlike John Henry Newman, Muriel Spark is not a priest but an artist, and so does not need to apologise to anybody for her life. And unlike, say. Simone de Beauvoir, Muriel ...”

“... is more’: ‘We know that less is not more. It is simply less!’ Mies was upset when Frank Lloyd Wright, whom he considered a friend, echoed the sentiment: ‘These Bauhaus architects ran from political totalitarianism in Germany to what is now made by specious promotion to seem their own totalitarianism in art here in America … Why do I ...”

“... Most historians respond to contemporary trends in their discipline, though without being so frank about it. Would I have been as disturbed if he had defended his researches on Medieval literacy in similar terms? I suspect myself of reacting not to his reason for endorsing the subject but to the subject itself. Should I therefore be branded with the ...”

“... Elvis Presley, whose family had moved to Memphis two years earlier from Tupelo, Mississippi. Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm, a five-piece jump combo – tenor and baritone sax plus three-man rhythm section – turned up at the Memphis Recording Service in early March 1951. They didn’t have an easy time getting there. They got stopped by the police ...”

“... for acrylic and metallic surfaces, for keeping the ‘paint as good as it was in the can’, in Frank Stella’s phrase? Or to the trenchant insistence on primary red, blue and yellow in the interwar Modernisms of Mondrian and the Bauhaus? The usual consensus is to place colour’s prime in the forty years from 1880, the era when chemistry’s heftiest ...”

“... the quest of her final book.) What other things made up Fitzgerald’s ‘burden’? Well, Frank Kermode was right early on, in this paper (22 November 1979), when he noticed the fascination with water, in its many forms and depredations: damp, flood, rain, drowning, ‘the dead man’s stench of river water’, the ‘long-awaited torrents’ that ...”

“... time to look back with some astonishment on the ordinary arrangements of the day. Consider W.J. Turner – admittedly a new and uncertain driver – driving to Warminster in second gear and not unnaturally ‘arriving with the engine red-hot’, which did not prevent his loyal wife asserting that ‘Walter is a splendid driver already.’ Consider Sassoon ...”

“... who championed the sinking. Others were moved to fisticuffs. The social-critical novelist Leonhard Frank overheard a socialist journalist proclaim in a posh Berlin café that the destruction of the Lusitania was ‘the greatest act of heroism in the whole of human history’. Frank marched over and slapped him in the ...”

“... of Wyoming promptly labelled Arnett an Iraqi ‘sympathiser’. The criticism even extended to Ted Turner, who was labelled ‘Baghdad Ted’, an appropriate consort for ‘Hanoi Jane’. Military and political leaders were instantly dispatched to the major television talk shows to provide spin control with euphemisms about ‘collateral damage’ and (in the ...”

“... imply anything, while seeming merely to pass the time of day.This is the sound of the bluesman Frank Hutchison, to whom Bob Dylan would return in 1993 for the version of ‘Stack A Lee’ (‘a romance tale without the cupidity,’ Dylan wrote) he offered on World Gone Wrong; it is the sound of drugstore speech in Hibbing, Minnesota, in 1949; it’s the ...”

“... what it was. The Victorian civic elite was taught by the Romantic histories of Hallam, Lingard and Turner to see the free-roaming, self-governing Saxon tribes as their antecedents. Having endured the tyranny of the rapacious Normans and the absolutism of the Stuarts, in the Victorian era the Saxon witenagemot mystically rose again in the form of city council ...”

“... English landscape’, with all that followed in terms of a settling of accounts with Constable and Turner, and Blake and Palmer, and Crome and the watercolourists and Ford Madox Brown, was at all compatible with being a painter ‘in the 20th century’. The pressure of this last question – or indeed of all three – is not to be collapsed into shorthand of ...”

“... preceding it with a significance it might not otherwise possess is given its fullest expression in Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending. In this, perhaps his most influential book, Kermode argued that fiction, like apocalypse, gives shape to time by translating the relentless tick-tick-tick of bare chronicity into the tick-tock of a meaningful plot. By ...”

“... did not become them, as it could seem to in Europe. In American movies, in Preston Sturges, in Frank Capra, the crowds whizz past in their comfortable clothes, and each person might be thinking their own thoughts, before one of them, Claudette Colbert or Jimmy Stewart, steps out. And if they seem wildly capable of being themselves, that capability is ...”

“... nothing but the working over of what is remembered.”’ Ellmann also quotes Joyce’s remark to Frank Budgen: ‘Imagination is memory.’ Budgen, whom Joyce met in Zurich in 1918, records Joyce expressing his aim ‘to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my ...”