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“... you. That is how you find them among the Rothkos – another magnet for contemplatives.Around the corner are Bruce Nauman’s assembled screens – a pair with talking heads, another with jumping clowns, a whole group with actors playing and replaying a domestic argument – and Paul McCarthy’s Rocky, in which, gloved ...”

“... his admirable study – his ‘other Pushkin’ is the storyteller and novelist, not the poet – Paul Debreczeny quotes Pushkin’s comments on Shakespeare’s characterisation. They go hand in hand with inconclusiveness, and show why it is that though Shakespeare had to finish the play, his characters never do. They are not completed by their dramatic ...”

“... in one respect, though: something is happening in recent British and Irish poetry. Poets like Paul Durcan, Ian McMillan and Peter Didsbury (all well represented here) are pushing the form towards performance and gaudy narrative. Many of the poets are writing long, stringy lines reminiscent of the American poet C.K. Williams, or having cartoonish fun with ...”

“... to make reader-reception – or the most effective propaganda? – our arbiter of war. Shades of Paul de Man, perhaps.It would, for instance, be both a pity and a lie if another Irish anthology. Troubled Times: ‘Fortnight’ Magazine and the Troubles in Northern Ireland I970-91,† had left out ‘what really happened’: its bleak ‘Chronology of Events ...”

“... up the backlist of the Nouvelle Vague. In the crucial scene Belmondo, cigarette lolling at the corner of his mouth, hat carefully tipped down over his eyes, gazes at a poster outside a cinema showing Plus dure sera la chute, a.k.a. The Harder They Fall – Bogart’s final film – and after a moment growls ‘Bogie’ in American-accented French. Before I ...”

“... while housed such diverse inhabitants as McCullers, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee, Paul and Jane Bowles and Richard Wright. (Auden seems to have been an especially terrible housemate, complaining about excessive use of toilet paper and telling people their colds weren’t physical but mental.) Carson was one of the original members; she arrived ...”

“... shop with a lot of bright flashy tourist pictures – flowers and fruit – just awful. In one corner of the room was a dark picture. We went over, and saw it was a horizontal landscape. We could see it was old. The dealer turned it vertically and we saw it was a hunter with a cap. Trees made the cap and bushes the chin. The ears were the target. We bought ...”

“... on a courtesy visit to the USSR, as it then was, in 1988, a party which included Craig Raine, Paul Bailey and Timothy Mo. I don’t remember laughing more on any trip before or since; we were a very silly group, so much so that we often mystified our hosts and sometimes behaved disgracefully. Sue – and I even noticed this in the photo the Guardian used ...”

“... many-zippered jacket with a camera swinging across his belly and I honk the horn. I haven’t met Paul, the photographer I’m going to be working with, before. I guess it’s him, and it is. A shy, proud, diligent Irishman who hoards his smiles, then doles them out, like a kid sharing sweets. Inside, a row of bobbing, grinning American soldiers welcomes us ...”

“... spot where Hammershøi painted from his rooms above 67 Great Russell Street. Today it’s Celia Paul who has a studio opposite the museum: ‘When I lie in bed, I am eye-level with the frieze above the door.’ She paints its façade shrouded in blackest brown and electric yellow, a dark imposing monolith from the days of gaslight, dripping with sulphurous ...”

“... to make them easier, but their terms came back to me immediately the other day as I rounded the corner and stood in Room One of Rembrandt: The Late Works. Out of the darkness came four self-portraits – the National Gallery’s, and paintings from Washington, the Mauritshuis, the Rijksmuseum – plus a strange, half-effaced, tender, despairing little print ...”

“... by God, were nonetheless buried, and lay in metal sarcophagi in the Kremlin and the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg. It is true that Russians bid farewell to their loved ones face to face. The final procession of Princess Diana through London in a closed hearse, with mourners behind barriers hurling bouquets at the car, was bizarre seen through ...”

“... opened the door for digital music, and also paved the way for superstar DJs like Fatboy Slim and Paul Oakenfold. In Britain there’s no doubt that Ecstasy – cooler and cheaper than getting drunk – triggered a rise in wider recreational drug use, and confirmed the existence of a troubled, troublesome section of society: the Britain of Trainspotting, So ...”

“... shame and embarrassment, though it couldn’t have occurred to me, at that age and in my sheltered corner, that RuPaul was a man.Gender roles have never made much sense to me. The more Drag Race I watched, the more I felt able to break free of them. (I experienced something similar in my twenties, when I became a sex worker as part of an attempt to undo my ...”

“... He is a reporter who became a full-time writer of books: Homicide (1991) and, with Ed Burns, The Corner (1997), both of which were turned into successful TV series. Both concern drugs and death in Baltimore; Simon has said that ‘what drugs have not destroyed, the war on them has.’ The Wire is different, though: more ambitious, more grounded, more ...”