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“... Politics are three-quarters drudgery, so it takes a special ingredient to enliven the diary of a politician. Harold Nicolson and Chips Channon wrote splendid diaries because they were not so much politicians as sublime social columnists who happened to sit in the House of Commons. Richard Crossman and Barbara Castle were heavyweights and professionals, and the eternal grind of committee life is reflected in their accounts ...”

“... modern art culture – Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Krasner, Hans Hofmann, the sculptor David Smith – which had spent a decade submitting to the master. ‘Aha,’ Gorky is supposed to have said coldly to de Kooning on first being shown the younger artist’s Picasso-saturated work, ‘so you have ideas of your own.’ Picasso’s aren’t good ...”

“... year before Bonnie and Clyde; he will have been eight when Chinatown appeared, and ten or so when David Bowie recorded the song that gives this book its title. Specktor’s mother was a screenwriter whose career was short-lived; later she was a drinker who snarled at her son for asking her to stop. By then she was divorced from his father, who was a leading ...”

“... And indeed, in his 1862 book The Illustrated Natural History – Birds, the Rev. J.G. Wood, the David Attenborough of his day, states that the cream-coloured courser ‘seems to live chiefly in Barbary or Abyssinia’. In the late 1860s, with the publication of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, the word ‘barbarian’ acquired a new resonance. Arnold ...”

“... Sometimes,’ a woman says during phone sex in Vox, Nicholson Baker’s first foray into smut, ‘I think with the telephone that if I concentrate enough I could pour myself into it and I’d be turned into a mist and I would rematerialise in the room of the person I’m talking to.’ That’s more or less how people get to the House of Holes – a sexual spa resort, offering expensive bespoke treatments, located in a parallel dimension ...”

“... many visitors – along with artist friends from closer to home, particularly Ben and Winifred Nicholson. In 1956, the Edes returned to England and Jim started looking for a suitable building. He wanted to buy a former stately home but didn’t have the money. Eventually, he found four small condemned slum cottages in the north of Cambridge. With the help ...”

“... including me and, somewhat later, Laura Freeman, first encountered the work of Miró and David Jones, Henry Moore, Brancusi, Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Gaudier-Brzeska and others. Like Ede’s life it spans the century; but, more than that, for those of us who had not grown up in houses where there were grand ...”

“... houses. In the mid-1930s Piper, as secretary of the influential Seven and Five Society on Ben Nicholson’s recommendation, was making collages with cut-up newspapers in imitation of Cubist papiers collés; he made constructions from string, experimented to find out what could be done with a single flowing line and painted superimpositions of moving ...”

“... them a German style (Gothic), storm clouds and the rising sun, stand for national renewal. Caspar David Friedrich’s symbolic stricken oaks and silent moonrise-watchers address the nation’s soul rather than its politics, but there, too, the search for a way to a German national future is evident.Nationalism and Modernism mix nowhere more strangely than in ...”

“... enough to print a correction without charge). In 1918, returned from the dead, he married Nancy Nicholson (daughter of William Nicholson the painter, sister to Ben Nicholson and herself a skilful illustrator and designer), with whom he had three children by 1922, although it was never ...”

“... A recent Italian book on the films of David Lean is called Colour and Dust, and with an amplification or two the phrase offers a pretty good description of his later work. The colour is mainly orange, and a lot of the dust is sand, especially in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). More generally, of course, the phrase evokes the director of swirling epics, a sort of Cecil B ...”

“... not this phantasma. Graves sought release from his own ‘phantasma’ in marriage to Nancy Nicholson, with whom he had four children, but, as poems like ‘Song of Contrariety’ or ‘Love in Barrenness’ testify, the relationship failed to provide Graves with the justification of his existence that he yearned for. The marriage was already faltering ...”

“... in the Louvre and it reopened in 1818 as a gallery for pictures by great living artists (including David, then in political exile). The creation of the first European museum of modern art was thus something of an expedient, but the political impulse behind it was not ephemeral. No subsequent French regime dared to neglect it. Unsurprisingly, the character of ...”

“... receiving royal assent. Blair was said to have directly intervened to delay its implementation. David Cameron later described FOI as a ‘buggeration factor’ that ‘furs up’ the arteries of government.It’s hardly surprising that FOI is unpopular in Downing Street. The MPs’ expenses scandal emerged from documents prepared in response to an ...”

“... John Lawrence, the future viceroy, was one of five brothers working simultaneously in India; John Nicholson, the hero of the siege of Delhi, was one of four brothers who died there. No family, however, sent as many members to India as the Lochs of Drylaw, whose contribution to the Jacobite cause had forced them to sell their estate outside Edinburgh. Thirty ...”