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“... of a critic who’d had the temerity to ignore Satie’s contribution to the Ballets Russes’ Grand French Festival. Satie was already mixing with a different crowd. He had met Man Ray at an exhibition of Ray’s work in 1921, and they’d gone drinking together. (On his way back to the gallery Ray bought a box of tacks and an iron, glued them ...”

“... tasteless plutocrat at a villa he built in Mallorca, where according to his English biographer, David Bellos, in Romain Gary: A Tall Story (2010), ‘he mostly ignored the people he invited, prowled around looking glum and subjected everyone to the various strange diets he took up to keep himself in shape.’ By the 1970s he was unalterably fixed as a ...”

“... as Gilroy says, shepherding the development of Black Arts charities and the building of David Adjaye’s Rivington Place, the first permanent public space in England ‘dedicated to diversity in the visual arts’. But he was horrified, too, by the way cultural studies as an academic discipline had developed, especially in the US. It had ...”

“... be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours lacking this obscene quantum of liquidity might well complain about the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the damage to their foundations. It doesn’t signify. And ...”

“... envied the men their licence to experience and capture the look of real action. The photographer David Scherman, her new American chum and lover, from whom she learned a lot, pointed out that she was ‘a perfectly bona fide Yank from Poughkeepsie’ and could herself qualify for such a job; so with Withers’s backing she sought and received accreditation ...”

“... the survivors with machine-gun fire. More than two hundred were killed. The prime minister, David Ben Gurion, instructed Yigal Allon, the operation’s leader, to deport the surviving residents. Another commander, Yitzhak Rabin, issued the order: ‘The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.’ These and other episodes of ...”

“... have to hold my breath for fear of infecting the people who come near me.’ A view shared by David Gascoyne (with whom she was briefly in love, she nearly 40, he not yet 20), who wrote: ‘On the whole, I think her influence on the people she comes in contact with is bad ... There are very few who can stand the dazzling (but how depressing!) light of ...”

“... of reading silently to oneself, as private carrels and cloisters were torn out and replaced with grand public rooms. And the miniaturisation of the book, hastened in 1501 when the Italian printer Aldus Manutius introduced the pocket-sized octavo format, brought reading out of libraries into everyday life. ‘As our ancestors imbued their minds with the ...”

“... been an entirely pragmatic membership, never an idealistic one. We never bought into Europe as a grand projet, or even an expression of fraternity. All this makes it hard for many here to imagine that idealism about the EU still has breath and life within Europe. After the Brexit vote, many of my European friends expressed disbelief and astonishment. It ...”

“... be cut. Or a future government could choose to abolish them, as the radical free marketeers of David Lange’s Labour Party did when they came to power in New Zealand in the 1980s. Many British farmers support Brexit. Others fear it would destroy them. The National Farmers Union has come out against, arguing that without subsidies, most British farms would ...”

“... all?’ she once asked me, and I put the line into Habeas Corpus and got a big laugh on it. From a grand Irish family she was quite snobbish and talking of someone she said: ‘Then he married a Mitford … but that’s a stage everybody goes through.’ Even the most ordinary remark would be given her own particular twist, and she could be quite ...”

“... His cup would require several lifetimes’ scouring.) Later that afternoon, on a road near the Grand Canyon, everything tilted on its axis. Elvis grabbed Geller’s arm and pointed out of the bus at some distant clouds, shouting: ‘Look! There’s Joseph Stalin in the clouds! What is he doing up there?’ He had the bus stop, and ran into the ...”

“... university courses, Pelmanism manuals, self-improvement tracts – volumes that were all in the grand, glass-fronted bookcase. Therein lay knowledge. Therein lay my father’s studies . . .Newspapers?Oh, the Daily Mail would be considered middle-class and therefore rather smart. No, not smart, but respectable. Respectability was the aim.Can you remember any ...”

“... and development of the great writer. He was born on a Friday, on the same day as his young hero David Copperfield, and for ever afterwards Friday became for him a day of omen ... Born in Portsmouth on Friday, February 7, 1812, Charles Dickens was the second child of a slim, dark-haired, pretty woman. On the night of his birth, Elizabeth Dickens, who ...”

“... accusation of academic complacency. ‘Lightning, Phoenix, Arizona’ has the abrupt menace of a David Lynch dream sequence, the cardiac arrest when a previously straightforward narrative crosses the line and touches a vertiginous post-mortem truth. We need to be reminded of the ugly, petrol-breathed, epidermic floss sulking past our own windows. These ...”