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“... its own partisans, SOE was an intelligence professional’s bad dream. June 1942: enter young Leo Marks. Having failed to convince the cryptographic services that he was suitable for the coding unit at Bletchley, but evincing a wayward brilliance that indicated he was too smart to do routine work, Marks was ...”

“... artificiality’, is the poet’s own performance. Although they display few of the familiar marks of the experimental avant-garde, they are akin to the work of certain Modernist poets in their studied avoidance of most connections with actual social life and, above all, in their manifest aspiration toward becoming purely self-referential ...”

“... at least, The Scheme for Full Employment could not have been written by anyone else – it marks a new outpost even for Mills. Not that this is unexpected: his three previous novels show the trajectory of a distinctive writer seeing how far he can go. From the very funny, but very deliberate, suggestiveness of his first novel, The Restraint of Beasts ...”

“... messages was feeble, and security checks for the Playfair cipher, according to the cryptographer Leo Marks, ‘had all the validity of a child’s excuses for staying up late, with none of the imagination’. Foolish errors were made: one agent packed pyjamas bearing the label ‘Harrods – The Man’s Shop’; another had his codename written on his ...”

“... the book’s most obvious model is L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between. Like Hartley’s narrator, Leo, Frayn’s protagonist, Stephen Wheatley, is tormented by a schoolboy code prohibiting sneaking, blubbing and emotional expression in general. Leo is bullied by ‘Jenkins and Strode’, Stephen by ‘Hanning and ...”

“... and antisemitism.Yet in other ways he seems keen to affirm existing categories. The Trees marks a formal departure for Everett. In place of a first-person narrator, he adopts multiple perspectives, over 106 chapters. It’s an approach that should yield complication, but for all the pinballing, we never encounter anything that troubles the worldview ...”

“... about postwar art.*Johns made an exceptional entrance in early 1958: his first show at the new Leo Castelli Gallery nearly sold out, with three paintings immediately purchased by MoMA, and one piece appearing on the cover of ARTnews. Then 27, he had sized up the New York art world precisely, dominated as it then was by the formalist model of ‘modernist ...”

“... in 1962 when Lichtenstein’s show of enlarged frames from war comics and romance comics at the Leo Castelli Gallery put out the news that another artist – he was not well known – had taken a sharp turn off the path most American high art was following.There are pictures in the Hayward show from right up to the last year of his life – 1997. In the ...”

“... women have affairs (one long-standing, the other whirlwind, according to their temperaments) with Leo. First encountered as an Adonis in the 1930s, Leo matures into a genial Rasputin in the 1960s. He presides over a sub-Reichian ‘Academy of Potential Development’, where, for hefty fees, clients can learn to be ‘become ...”

“... Lev or Leo Nussimbaum (aka Essad Bey, aka Kurban Said) was born in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, in 1905. As a young man he claimed to be the son of an immensely wealthy Persian-Turkic prince. In his first published book, Blood and Oil in the Orient, Nussimbaum wrote that his supposed father had ‘the facial expression, imperturbable, weary and yet eager for activity, of an Oriental who has transferred the old traditions of command to the social life of a young oil city ...”

“... blue plaque commemorates Dryden, but on the wrong house. At No. 9, a more accurately sited plaque marks where, in 1764, Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson founded the Literary Club, or simply the Club, which met weekly to dine in an upstairs room at the Turk’s Head until the landlord died and the dinners moved elsewhere. The building now houses New Loon ...”

“... Nazis. The book was published in 1946, and this new edition, with an introduction by Edward Said, marks the 50th anniversary of its first appearance in the United States. Auerbach ranges through some of the mighty monuments of Western literature, from Homer, medieval romance, Dante and Rabelais to Montaigne, Cervantes, Goethe, Stendhal and a good many authors ...”

“... book, although in scope and ambition much more restricted than Crowe’s and Cavalcaselle’s, marks in this respect a most welcome change. It is the first truly informative account of Titian’s life published in English in recent years, based as it is on the author’s vast knowledge of previously unpublished information. Specialists are likely to ...”

“... this frieze punctuated by five indentations is made of fibreglass and resin, not wax, and the marks are Nauman’s own, not the auratic relics of great visionaries. At the same time his corporeal substitutes often evoke the body all the more – the chair is his favourite ‘stand-in for the figure’ – and this is the case too when Nauman shapes other ...”

“... and ‘effect’; the misuse of ‘enormity’), thinks lovingly about her husband, Leo, mourns her dead parents, and despairs over the state of the environment, Trump’s presidency, mass shootings, and the historic genocides of indigenous people. ‘A lot of people think all I think about is pie,’ she thinks, ‘when really it’s my spinal ...”