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“... shouting, grinning, gurning. But they were sometimes more than caricatures. Jan Lievens’s Man with a Turban (1629), on display at Turning Heads at the National Gallery of Ireland (until 26 May), is contemplative rather than active.Lievens was not one for wild expression or extreme physiognomy; his tronies summon a striking human presence. He could ...”

“... facilities on-site, but these are as much for show as the ornamental pathways which end in cul-de-sacs once they are out of sight of the roads. The executives who work there seem to have no time for leisure and no need for it. Eden-Olympia is a place more to be looked at than lived in. Ballard notes in the foreword that Eden-Olympia was inspired by ...”

“... Goebbels’s Deutecher Kunstbericht had appeared in 1933 and discredited artists like Otto Dix and Paul Klee had already been removed from teaching posts at German academies. The new decree formalised the persecution of the avant-garde movement in art. Around sixteen thousand works of art were confiscated from public collections. Six hundred and fifty or so ...”

“... Charles V, could lay claim to be another Charles the Great because of what this insignificant man had done in a hole in a corner of his wide dominions. Luther became the incarnate legend of God’s strength made perfect in human weakness: the Bible story of Gideon, or of the shepherd boy David. For it was the religious anxieties and unanswered questions ...”

“... inadequacy as a mediator had been demonstrated. There was a war on, ‘and he who ventures into no-man’s-land brandishing cigarettes and singing carols must expect to be shot at.’ It was altogether a turning-point for him. Like St Jerome in Bethlehem, he retired to his study and applied himself to his Bible (the evenings in Cambridge, he has written ...”

“... Even before it was published, Christy and the late Jacqueline Turner’s Man Corn provoked media hubbub. Last November, the New Yorker published a long profile of Christy Turner, and soon afterwards the story was picked up in Britain. The Times dedicated half a page to a discussion of the book’s findings, and even reflected on them in a leader ...”

“... his conjugal duties; followed by a bed-switch involving more dupery (taken from Philippe de Laon’s One Hundred New Tales); followed by a moralité about a vengeful wife who murders and dismembers her husband (by François de Rosset). A more refined example of romance (a cloudy category), from a later ...”

“... using it as a fulcrum on which to spin. Pindar in his Third Nemean Ode records an instance of a man outpacing a wild boar, but his example – Achilles – is not typical. Around the turn of the fifth century BC, Xenophon noted that the boar is designed to attack animals taller than himself. Boars have been known to knock over camels, attack elephants and ...”

“... could find them. ‘And you: I suppose you are Episcopalian?’ Sister Rita asked me. A fat bald man was standing at the door of the church, holding his hand out and intoning in a funny high voice: ‘Could you give me something because I cannot see?’ I’m sure the sister wouldn’t have minded, that she would perhaps have looked on me as a challenge, but ...”

“... For a long time, Paul Auster’s novels were much more popular in France than in America. Perhaps this is because he sounds more convincing in French. ‘Ecrivain de la mégapole, de l’errance et du hasard, Paul Auster est devenu un auteur culte,’ one Parisian blurb-artist writes, catching the appeal in a way that his English-speaking counterparts find difficult ...”

“... teachers ‘were unanimous in finding my paintings execrable’. A version of Rubens’s Hélène de Fourment et ses enfants from 1863 already has a characteristic lightness and buoyancy. Renoir became part of the group that gathered around Manet and which included several other rebellious former students of Gleyre’s, among them Monet, Bazille and ...”

“... brilliant but wayward second Duke of Buckingham could be applied, with reservations, to Foucault:A man so various, that he seemed to beNot one, but all Mankind’s Epitome.Stiff in Opinions, always in the wrong;Was everything by starts, and nothing long.He was certainly just as volatile. In his twenties a Stalin-quoting Communist, he later blamed the CP for ...”

“... Paul Lafargue drove Engels to despair. Negotiating with other French socialists over the founding of the Parti Ouvrier Français in 1881, he committed ‘blunder after blunder’ and nearly wrecked the whole thing. In 1889, charged with organising the founding conference of the Second International in Paris, he was making ‘a terrible hash of things ...”

“... hand holding a cigarette, the other in conjunction with a whisky bottle. The implacability of the man stays stamped on his photographed features till the end – strongly marked in Richard Avedon’s famous portrait of 1969. Vera passes photographically through the book like royalty, always exuding grace, joy and beauty. Igor’s snapshot of her by a lake in ...”

“... The Spell is as straightforwardly readable – and haunting – as the stories of Walter De La Mare, say, or as Emily Brontë. Secondly, it is a reflection on the largest public event in Broch’s life – the takeover of Germany and Austria by the Nazis, heralding their attempt to conquer the world, using ‘crowd-psychology’. Thirdly, it is ...”