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“... gnomically (but it’s the truth), ‘Beckmann was time.’ He was successful early, painting John Martin-like catastrophes on a huge scale: visionary, awful, sandy things. The first monograph on him appeared before the First World War, when he was still in his twenties. In the war, he was an ambulance man on the Western Front, before suffering a complete ...”

“... art-historical spotlight after three centuries in the wings. But commentators are all on the back foot. We might argue that having trained in the north, Caravaggio learned artistic manners brasher than those with which his central Italian contemporaries felt comfortable, and that Counter-Reformation ideologues approved of this trenchant approach. It is ...”

“... In ‘A Wave’, the title-poem of his new collection, John Ashbery says, among many other things: One idea is enough to organise a life and project it Into unusual but viable forms, but many ideas merely Lead one thither into a morass of their own good intentions. The reference to ‘one idea’ recalls the passage in ‘Esthétique du Mal’ where Wallace Stevens dismisses                                      the lunatic of one idea         In a world of ideas, who would have all the people Live, work, suffer and die in that idea In a world of ideas ...”

“... in circumstances that had a lasting effect. On 11 November 1975 the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, dismissed Whitlam as Prime Minister, dissolved both houses of parliament, and installed the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Fraser, as head of a caretaker government pending immediate elections. It was the gravest crisis in Australian history. Hawke ...”

“... humaine (1933). The first of these, which is set in Canton, was written before he ever set foot in China, but what he’d seen of Hong Kong and Saigon was enough to supply the novel with its ample urban colour. In La Condition humaine, the setting has moved north to Shanghai, and by the time he wrote it Malraux had been with Clara on an extensive Asian ...”

“... then died out, and with them the magic left the world. In the north of Westeros there’s a 700-foot-high wall, built to keep out ‘white walkers’, terrifying undead magical sort-of zombies who once lived in this same north and were a mortal danger to men. The wall is guarded by the Night’s Watch, a sworn order of men who take a lifelong oath to defend ...”

“... though I’d have thought the chances of him persuading his mamma to come are pretty slim. John Gielgud was once telling me about Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of Antony ...”

“... of metacriticism? No head for the heights of abstraction – vertigo hits you as soon as you set foot on the gossamer constructions of current art theory? You get ringing in your ears when you read Norman Bryson, and fear you have caught Ménière’s disease off the page? Do not despair. There is a remedy. The second posthumous volume of Edgar Wind’s ...”

“... thought I’d been drinking.’ The Amis style, though, doesn’t altogether fit its new context. John Self would gorge himself on emetic burgers but he wouldn’t analyse his own motives for cholesterol abuse, as Miller does: ‘I knew the stuff I was cramming into my body was crap, but I also knew there was something seductive and pleasure-giving about it ...”

“... of convention. That said, the books are hardly subversive. Father is in the Navy, where John and Roger expect to follow him. Mate Susan, caring and cooking, is training herself for middle-class wifehood. Her mother, though reared in the Australian outback, is (unlike Ransome’s remarkable second wife) very content to employ servants. Through Slump ...”

“... always reserving something of himself from the public domain. The hand-waving, the shifting from foot to foot, the rapid-fire presentation, the Tony Soprano accent promising infinitely less intelligence than it delivered, the only-seeming lowering of the scientific tone – a pose that Feynman himself called ‘aggressive ...”

“... of Pliny’s speech in praise of Trajan (the Panegyric) and some commentary on the Gospel of St John. But the prize finds, making up the largest part of the book, were faintly legible copies of the correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, one of the leading scholars and orators of the second century ad, and tutor to the future emperor Marcus Aurelius, who ...”

“... and William Dawes, a Boston tanner, were originally sent to warn two of the Revolutionary leaders, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who were staying at a parsonage in Lexington, that a British force was on its way to arrest them. Both Revere and Dawes successfully completed this part of their mission, which was based on misinformation: the British had been sent ...”

“... want all that. And I want all that and I want all that.’ Or like the fast-food, fast-sex junkie John Self of Money, who always gets less than he bargains for, yet keeps going back for more: ‘I would cheerfully go into the alchemy business, if it existed and made lots of money.’ Amis goes to any length to remind us of our whole-hearted addiction to the ...”

“... the story. An intuition that Ryan could do this on the most forbidding terrain prompted his friend John Houseman in 1953 to offer him the lead in a New York stage production of Coriolanus. ‘He was a black Irishman,’ wrote Houseman in his memoir Front and Centre, ‘an athlete in his youth, a disturbing mixture of anger and tenderness who had reached ...”