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“... have been up for it. DIS, SIS, ICG, CIC, JIC, FAC, ISC, DCDI: these are a few of the acronyms most frequently referred to in the proceedings of the Inquiry and in the evidence submitted to it – several hundred letters, e-mails, transcripts, drafts, reports and scribbles (the scribbles aren’t always fully legible to the scribbler being ...”

“... Heard are newly included. Letters (also to Craft) from Arnold Schoenberg, Luigi Dallapiccola, Glenn Gould and other musical luminaries are also published for the first time; and most of the illustrations are new. Gone are the itineraries that laboriously prefaced each chapter-year in the original edition and the ...”

“... Y. Yau (closed until February but available online), features some seventy objects by Tompkins, most of them hung vertically against white walls like tapestries or modernist paintings. It is a studiously dignified presentation that highlights the striking optical effects of her works, as in the showstopper String (1985) with its luscious, undulating strips ...”

“... arm, he wanted one statement on the record from the outset. ‘This,’ he proclaimed, ‘is the most humble day of my life.’ As the American satirist Jon Stewart observed, Murdoch wasn’t so humbled that he was willing to wait his turn to speak. But his very presence in Portcullis House represented an extraordinary turnaround. After dominating British ...”

“... go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour … she will probably give birth, and to what? – the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known? Or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For ...”

“... healthy attitude, no doubt, though not widespread among the press. It’s fitting that the most disgusting revelations in Ben Schreckinger’s The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power (Little, Brown, £25) are to do with Trump and his coterie of goons rather than the Bidens themselves. The contrast is between shameless fraud and ...”

“... the Hamptons, the rooftop suite at the George V in Paris, the account at Asprey’s in London, but most important, control of the Mulholland Trust. That was what Louise prized most; that was the future. Glass spends his happiest moments with his mistress, Alison, a young Irish painter, ‘very dark of hair and very pale of ...”

“... the Daily News headline ran: ‘FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.’ Yet, as the downtown writer Glenn O’Brien recalled, ‘instead of dropping dead, New York came alive.’ Experimental venues emerged, dedicated to a new scene of live music, fancy dress, performance and installations. The Mudd Club opened on Halloween 1978 (the name announced its ...”

“... Enid Stevick is obscured, as is the sense of suffering and helplessness imparted by the book’s most resonant image, a memory experienced on the evening of Enid’s suicide attempt: ‘She remembered a mourning dove the boys had caught in the vacant lot then dosed with gasoline then lit with a match. The bird’s wild wings flapping flying in looping crazy ...”

“... tended grass verges. The war memorial at the entrance to the village was planted with wildflowers. Most of the posters pinned to the noticeboard outside the community centre were about gardening. When the smoke from the golf course blew into Clara Vale it was an unwelcome and bituminous blast from the village’s past. Residents kept their windows closed. The ...”

“... to understand what the professionals are up to. He knows a great deal more about music than most amateurs, and argues persuasively that it should not be left entirely to the rigorous mercies of the musicologists. The result is this very interesting, excited, crammed little book, in which admirable and questionable propositions jostle one another so ...”

“... Che Guevara, Greta Garbo, Edith Sitwell, JFK, Maria Callas, Howard Hughes, Andy Warhol, Glenn Gould, the late Princess of Wales) down to minor bog-sprites such as Eartha Kitt, Cher or Quentin Crisp. (Such lists are infinitely expandable.) What links each of these disparate individuals is a singularity so tangible as to border on the uncanny. We ...”

“... since Nineteen Eighty-Four lay twelve years in the future. Orwell’s earliest writings were, like most juvenilia, comically bad. A story called ‘The Vernon Murders’, written when he was about thirteen, has a beginning which is deadly in several senses: ‘The sky was overcast, & everything was silent in the darkening twilight save for the whispering in ...”

“... The odd thing is that most of the contributors to these books doubt whether it is possible to offer a clear and distinct idea of the subject under discussion. Indeed, Karen Painter, one of the editors of the Getty volume, says right out that ‘late style does not exist in any real sense.’ But she and her colleagues continue to search for distinguishing marks of lateness in the work of major artists in their last years, to ask whether they give evidence of failing powers, such as might in the ordinary course of things be expected: senescence; illness; the decay of the senses; the certainty that death, always feared at a distance but now in the room, is taking a hand ...”

“... started out, as he did himself, in the North-East: but there was a wish to put him down, much as Glenn Hoddle was always being put down, before being driven off to France. I expect that the same outlook will see to it that the international career of Peter Beardsley, also from the North-East, will soon be reaching a premature end. It is possible to feel that ...”