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“... is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.’ So wrote Nicole Krauss. Paul Auster ranked the book with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina: ‘wrenching, beautiful, unforgettable’. Grossman’s American publisher called it ‘one of the very greatest novels I shall have the privilege of publishing … When critics look back at the ...”

“... lie in perceptual as well as in cultural embarrassment. A laconic note from David Hockney prefaces Paul Joyce’s conversations with him. It ends: ‘My photographer friends said it wasn’t really photography but painting. I’m not so sure, but I think that’s where I’d like to leave it.’ Whether it is ‘it’ the work or ‘it’ the discussion, there ...”

“... Alma Mahler Werfel​ celebrated her 70th birthday at home in Beverly Hills on the last day of August 1949. A brass band played as guests chose from a Mitteleuropean selection of drinks: champagne, black coffee or Alma’s favourite, Bénédictine (by the end of her life, she was drinking a bottle a day). In the dining room, an abundant buffet was laid out ...”

“... event (and even the Serie A game between Roma and Inter postponed to the following day). Pope John Paul II is to celebrate a televised mass in St Peter’s, and then travel down to San Giovanni Rotondo to celebrate Mass there. The millions of pellegrini in attendance are to be transported by more than five thousand coaches (100 from Poland alone) and 19 ...”

“... through the influence of his elder brother, Thomas, himself a gifted artist and architect, Paul Sandby was taken on as a military draftsman for the Board of Ordnance, producing reliable maps for use in the subjugation of the Highlands. By the time of his death, his astonishing industry had earned him many years of genteel prosperity, selling his ...”

“... everyone in the area knew about the discovery of a new and remarkable set of cave paintings in the hills to the south of Montignac. Then in February 1942 the château was raided by the Gestapo. Champerret got away, but Dupois knew nothing of his subsequent movements. ‘Did he ever marry?’ I asked her. ‘Non,’ she replied emphatically, ‘ce n’était ...”

“... magical drugs and incantations, raising under the streets of London the choicest products of the hills and valleys of France. They can squeeze Bordeaux out of sloe and draw Champagne from an apple. Berry Bros’s records aren’t complete; if you’re running a wine business, you’re not thinking about the archive. Some survive, such as the records of ...”

“... minority in Rwanda. All else about this small East African country, ‘the land of a thousand hills’, is open to question and, indeed, bears re-examination. ‘Freedom of opinion is a farce,’ Hannah Arendt wrote in 1966 in ‘Truth and Politics’, ‘unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.’ The problem ...”

“... A project is not worth undertaking until the primary metaphor has revealed itself: difficulty. Hills to run up, impossible objects to be manoeuvred, actors to be converted – by dirt, drink, labour – into human beings. I relished the spit and sweat of his feature film, This Filthy Earth, the faces and the voices. The way it opens with a young woman ...”

“... did eat it suffered bilious, flatulent attacks. After one meal, the painter and Bauhaus teacher Paul Klee, who prided himself on being a good cook, worried that ‘even his worms would leave him’. The man responsible for the Bauhaus’s garlic problem was the Swiss expressionist painter Johannes Itten, a friend of Alma Mahler who had run a private art ...”

“... of Mathematics of the Soviet Union. Two other French mathematicians are present, Arnaud Denjoy and Paul Montel, who had supervised Szolem’s PhD thesis. The others at the dinner table are Benoit’s father (second from left, referred to throughout as ‘Father’), his grandfather Szlomo, the white-bearded patriarch of the family who spoke only Yiddish, and ...”

“... greennesses, lights from a pond or two’; after ‘cindery inbetweens’ come hills which ‘swell up’ and are ‘free of it’. Tomlinson turns to this residual and resurgent nature in ‘The Marl Pits’ for what was, after all, the way out. It was a language of water, light and air I sought, he begins, needing a release from the ...”

“... us closer to a condition of missing something we have never known, as if the ‘blue remembered hills’ are an image of involuntary memory: not experienced consciously at the time, as a condition of being recoverable in another time. It has often taken outsiders (James, Conrad, Eliot) to define Englishness – and to defend Housman. The well-wrought urn of ...”

“... masturbation’. This was in a letter of 1964 to the New Statesman, the people’s friend, where Paul Johnson had proclaimed that the Beatles were common, and a ‘menace’, and that, at their age, he himself had been into Beethoven and good books. He described his feelings at the sight of their wretched fans on television: ‘What a bottomless chasm of ...”

“... A collection of essays entitled The New Museology suggests where suitable candidates may be found. Paul Greenhalgh is one. He cheerfully announces that ‘in these times of desperate financial pressure’ – can he be referring to Mrs Thatcher’s ‘economic renaissance’? – museums ‘cannot exist simply as a receptacle guarding our heritage, or as a ...”