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“... statutory feet, he puts on his glove again, saying: ‘If you should need me I’m just round the corner’ (i.e. in Arlington House). I ask Miss S. how long she has had the van. ‘Since 1965,’ she says, ‘though don’t spread that around. I got it to put my things in. I came down from St Albans in it and plan to go back there eventually. I’m just ...”

“... stood at a party watching the ever watchable Sontag, who had taken command of the opposite corner of the salon. She was showing us her profile, standing with her arms folded, swathed in scarves, her black mane accented by that theatrical streak of white, scanning the room for traitors.’ What the portraits seldom captured was a quality obscured by ...”

“... hug the wall.’ And so he sets off, charting a course from his desk towards a painting hung in a corner, and from there he continues obliquely towards the door, but is waylaid by his armchair, which he sits in for a while, poking the fire, daydreaming. Then he bestirs himself again, presses north towards his bed, the place where ‘for one half of our ...”

“... dérangée, translated into English in 1996 as A Disgraceful Affair: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Bianca Lamblin. While professing to be a kind of perverse tribute, the Lamblin book is actually a morbid recounting of its author’s adolescent love affair with Simone de Beauvoir, who first seduced her then passed her over – with chilling ...”

“... worries that its imperial powers were atrophying as those of other empires had done (see Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) were allayed by victory in the Cold War and the subsequent discovery that its economy is the driving force for the rest of the world and a model nearly everywhere. After telling a little parable (this is a ...”

“... her radical beginnings as they did, Dame Iris’s spiritual journey not all that different from Paul Johnson’s.10 February. At Christmas G. and R. gave me a subscription to This England (‘Britain’s Loveliest Magazine’), which at first seemed a conventional magazine of the countryside with thatched cottages, country houses and even Patience ...”

“... axis, and how under-noticed it has been on the other, that would surely be in the top right-hand corner, an outrageous failure that in a well-functioning society would be guaranteed to bring down the government and trigger reform of the Treasury and procurement systems. Instead, the person at the head of the machinery which supervised, or failed to ...”

“... sat close to the model – from those drawings which include his own reflection in a mirror, or a corner of his sketch-book at the bottom of the sheet. Even (indeed, particularly) when they are done in only a few lines, these drawings tell us a great deal about the way flesh folds and creases in response to a pose – and to keep hold of this kind of ...”

“... up from school or collecting a pizza. How do traffic bosses ensure that 800 limousines get to the corner of Hollywood and Highland at exactly the right time? If they fail, and there will be a concatenation of failures before they succeed, an international audience of millions will lose their faith in Hollywood. So: ‘The limos are starting to back ...”

“... and ‘thank you’ part of her vocabulary. But in her first official portrait by Paul Emsley, unveiled in January, her eyes are dead and she wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to bugger off. One critic said perceptively that she appeared ‘weary of being looked at’. Another that the portrait might pass ...”

“... Manhattan’s Café Bizarre, when an already enormously famous Andy Warhol (and his canny manager, Paul Morrissey) arrived to offer them a deal. Warhol was in need of music. He, or Morrissey, seems to have known of the group through the overlap between the underground film world and the avant-garde musicians who worked as accompanists. Warhol put them on a ...”

“... thought about this for some time but my thoughts were focused when I saw Isabelle Huppert in Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 film, Elle. The film begins with a rape about which the victim, Huppert, is ambivalent. This sent the critics, particularly male critics, scuttling to and fro wondering whether it was a feminist, post-feminist or anti-feminist film, or ...”

“... condition.’ Instead he studied psychology and sociology, and began a correspondence with Jean-Paul Sartre, whose work – especially his Réflexions sur la question juive – impressed him for its commitment to the ‘bloody concrete of the world of men’.In 1949, Memmi returned to Tunis with his wife, Marie-Germaine Dubach, a Catholic from Alsace, and ...”

“... not heard of (though she assured me that ‘she had, of course, known the pianist’ – the late Paul Jacobs – ‘very well’); but I almost came a cropper when I confessed I had never listened to Janáček’s The Excursions of Mr Broucek. She gave me a surprised look, then explained, somewhat loftily, that I owed it to myself, as a ‘cultivated ...”

“... sight. Despite the hundreds and hundreds of people trooping past, there, on the grass by the corner of Stable House Street, is a fox. It is just out of the light, slinking by with its head turned towards the parade of people passing, none of whom notice it. It’s quite small, as much fawn as red, and is, I imagine, a vixen. It lopes unhurriedly along ...”