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“... finished. When Mies drew her attention to the excellence of his chief draftsman, she sat in the man’s office for hours practising mechanical drawing after persuading him to give her lessons. ‘I took my drawing board and T-square with me when I travelled, even to Paris,’ she writes.Lambert’s account is so engaging not only because it is the story of ...”

“... on Bond Street introduced time into the vision of souls, bliss, beauty: Hirst’s objets de vertu were ephemeral, and fell to the ground after their short span was done. They invert the usual definition of art as eternal, countering time and decay. The words tempus and temple share the same root; the connection suggests that the function of a sacred ...”

“... considers the careers of ten who made their names in the decade. By 1950 change was coming. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published in English in 1953. There were increasing opportunities for women who were bold and determined enough to take them. Yet for all Cooke’s justified satisfaction in finding so many possible subjects from which to make ...”

“... In​ 1984 Guillaume Dustan drafted a personal ad: ‘In brief: young man, eighteen, hypokhâgne, Lycée Henri-IV, short brown hair, 1.7 metres, part preppy, part 1950s greaser, not very sporty – sensual – funny, neither a party animal nor a bookworm. Now let’s see if the feeling is mutual …’ Written when he still went by the name William Baranès, it anticipates the Guillaume Dustan to come: the pointed mention of his prestigious schooling; the importance of cultivating ‘a look’ (often imported from America); the fear of being consigned to a particular identity or sphere (either the nightclub or the library) that might foreclose some as yet unknown experience ...”

“... a Lady Chatterley-ish story of a woman, Eva, who flees an unhappy marriage with a wealthy older man, and falls in love with a young engineer called Adam. Machaty had planned a close-up of the heroine’s face as Adam kisses her and wanted the audience to be in no doubt that she had indeed reached a state of ‘ecstasy’, in Eden, with her Adam. The trouble ...”

“... years between them, one with an older woman, Margaret and Ivan, and one with the more usual older man, Peter and Naomi; a filial and a quasi-filial pair, Peter and Ivan, and Ivan and Sylvia; and one age-matched couple, Peter and Sylvia. Across expected lines of sympathy and understanding, new groupings form, and each makes at least one unexpected gesture ...”

“... party’s 2019 slogan, ‘Get Brexit Done’; the former Vote Leave director of communications, Paul Stephenson; and Ben Guerin, one half of Topham Guerin, the political consultancy firm that rebranded the Conservatives’ official Twitter account as a fact-checking service during a pre-election debate.*Johnson, the group agreed, needed a simple message ...”

“... native, the unpalatable facts would soon become obvious. In such a system, he wrote, ‘the white man’s superiority, the basis of every colonial regime, is undermined.’ Eritrea toiled on under Italian administration into the glory days of Fascism. In 1930, eight years after the March on Rome, Ras Tafari was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, and ...”

“... spirit and an alter ego through whom, you could say, he re-created himself. His Cavafy – the man’s bespectacled face, his world, his city, his life, his sound, his gestus – constituted a double translation of the poetry, into the portable art of etching via an English version of the original Greek text. The Tate, which owns a set of the prints, says ...”

“... with no binding ties to France (‘we have one prime and essential need: our dignity’). De Gaulle warned Guineans that a strike of this kind against French influence would be a Pyrrhic victory and when Sékou Touré’s cause prevailed, France was as good as its word. On the eve of independence, as an estimated three thousand French nationals ...”

“... at Stratford the curtain rose with Antony on his knees pleasuring the Egyptian queen of Frances de la Tour. Even the jaded eyebrows of Stratford went up a bit at this and just before it transferred to the Barbican Alan rang and began without preamble: ‘I’m sure you will be relieved to learn that for our London debut the director has elbowed the ...”

“... the shortlist, with Naipaul’s A Bend in the River the clear frontrunner. Julian Barnes remembers Paul Theroux, who was judging, saying he would ‘skim out into the pampas’ the candidates he considered non-starters; back from Patagonia, there he sat at the Booker dinner, ‘a polite smile on his face’. ‘I couldn’t help enjoying the ...”

“... change, resource depletion, the future of the planet and so on, which is more or less exactly what Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer hoped would happen when they first proposed it in the Global Change Newsletter in 2000. Crutzen is an atmospheric chemist; Stoermer, who died in 2012, was a freshwater ecologist. The nature of their work caused them to ...”

“... from the biblical curse of Noah to the quasi-scientific concept of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) which prevailed in the Spanish Empire. The question of how, exactly, these intellectual influences shaped social and political action is harder to fathom, especially in the more autonomous societies of the British Atlantic. James Walvin’s new book ...”

“... to Graham’s son, whose Intimate Lies is an account of her relationship with Fitzgerald, the old man was shocked: ‘He had believed quite simply that F. Scott Fitzgerald must surely have died years ago along with his era.’In late November 1940 Fitzgerald had a heart attack at a drugstore on Sunset Boulevard. Afterwards, confined to bed, he tried to ...”