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“... of the painting Guernica (which he helped to hang, though he would have preferred to blow it up). He hated the painting for bringing politics into art. So this business of exploding the social order via art, albeit scandalous art, is more complex, clearly, than we had thought. Surely there must be a thin line somewhere, visible to Buñuel, but ...”

“... crisis, the local husbands dutifully take the commuter train to Manhattan; when they return, they blow smoke rings of marijuana and praise the economic theories of Milton Friedman. ‘America rose and fell on the melodies of New Canaan’s songs about the economy. Songs sung by a Jewish economist and mimicked by Wasps who would have thought twice before ...”

“... century’s end. It is impossible to think of Sibelius’s music as in any way factitious, despite Simon Parmet’s claim that he used Golden Section proportions, just as Bartók and Debussy are supposed to have done. A certain amount of number-working is inherent to composition. What Sibelius demonstrates is that it was possible to write significant music in ...”

“... first émigré period’. Even more damagingly, Field has evidently been forbidden to quote from Simon Karlinsky’s edition of The Nabokov-Wilson Letters (1979), thus fatally impoverishing his account of the author’s most important literary relationship. (Karlinsky, incidentally, has his little say about Field’s ‘enormous blunders’ in the preface to ...”

“... their opponents. The most immediate result was the mass exodus of scientists to other countries, a blow from which German science has never recovered. Individuals such as Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, along with cultural institutions like the Frankfurt School and the Bauhaus, benefited the countries to which they fled, leaving Germany a ...”

“... practice. It is as if we had only the lyrics, without recordings or melodies, of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Joan Baez – and those only in indifferent Portuguese translations. Most of their power and all of their subtlety would vanish. For similar reasons, the troubadours have more often been honoured as cultural pioneers than admired as ...”

“... one of the characters in The Ice Storm imagines herself plunged by ‘a slight warp in her Paul Simon album’ into ‘a bottomless pit of loneliness beside which even Cambodia paled’, you take the point about well-heeled self-indulgence in the face of South-East Asian suffering without losing sight of her genuine isolation. Years later, though, Moody ...”

“... Korda snapped of the bereted Che Guevara at a memorial service for the victims is hard to avoid.Simon Hall’s Ten Days in Harlem is a lively account of Castro’s charm offensive in September 1960 when he visited New York again, this time to address the United Nations General Assembly. It was a sensitive moment for all concerned: Castro’s revolution was ...”

“... invited Moon to the White House, where the two men prayed together. Nixon’s fall was a grievous blow to Moon, who immediately set out on a campaign of extreme right-wing agitation to reverse what he saw as the decline into leftism inaugurated by Watergate. The Moonie newspaper, Rising Tide, played a key role in these years in rallying the disparate elements ...”

“... some form of public representation was inescapable and her disfigurement by smallpox – a great blow, thought contemporaries, to her husband’s career – made her painted image particularly difficult and painful for her. That she used exotic costume not merely as a flattering distraction from her ruined face but as a positive way of re-inventing ...”

“... change in his attitude towards his own experience’. The change was a matter of learning how to blow up real events and people to mythic proportions. It was Cassady who taught him this: the tear-away adventurer who stole cars and carried off women at a dizzying pace appeared to be more than human. The poetic tropes with which Kerouac limned his ...”

“... in idiom, too much sex – and the work was roundly condemned in Pravda. It was a substantial blow, but even as his colleagues dutifully criticised the opera in public, the Soviet arts boss Platon Kerzhentsev was responding warmly to his pleas for help in regaining official favour (while at the same time assuring the Politburo that Shostakovich had ...”

“... gods. Attempting a Tempest/Macbeth double bill at the Kennedy Center, the 65-year-old protagonist, Simon Axler, ‘the last of the best of the classical American stage actors’, is suddenly abandoned by his talent. No reason is given – there is no reason – and Axler suffers a breakdown, aggravated by his inability to believe even in the sincerity of his ...”

“... after his early winning streak, as each new play bombed, he underwent public whippings. John Simon called Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer and Sweet Bird of Youth ‘cowardly’, and, in 1978, wrote: ‘The kindest thing to assume is that Williams died shortly after completing Sweet Bird of Youth, and that his subsequent, ever more dismal ...”

“... of The Prince was ‘shrewd’ if ‘immoral’. In Britain, the influential 1602 translation by Simon Patrick of Innocent Gentillet’s treatise Anti-Machiavel managed to disseminate Machiavelli’s ideas, sometimes in garbled form, as it rebutted them. Gentillet notes with satisfaction that although he doesn’t know if the Medici (to one of ...”