“... 20th-century attempts to frame the landscape, in the manner of Fox Talbot, Pitt Rivers or Edward Thomas, are viewed with suspicion. Their pastoral fantasies – expressed in photography, archaeology or poetry – become a mark of distance and loss. In the closing pages, Thorpe plays a postmodern trick, suddenly introducing a character called Adam Thorpe. He ...”

“... seen many hotels recently: the rich, crowded period hotel in Death in Venice which that film loved more than it loved Venice, Tadzio or death; or the banner-streaming, nostalgically remembered hotel in Fellini’s Amarcord; or J.G. Farrell’s hero committed to reviving the antiquated Hotel Majestic in Troubles; or, most notably now, The White Hotel of ...”

“... in Kreuzberg. He had no children, or none he knew about; had never slept with the same girl more than five times; had written nothing; had no money; no family, now; was replaceable.’ The book begins when Friedrich is catching a ride back from Cologne to Berlin with two strangers: a pretty girl who has named herself, improbably, Daphne; and the ...”

“... the novelist asks a friend to come to Tunbridge Wells, where she will be able to see a figure more ‘grotesque’ even than Beau Nash or Colley Cibber, ‘a sly sinner, creeping along the very edges of the walks, getting behind benches ... afraid of being seen ... Come and see this odd figure!’ – who is of course Richardson himself. Rawson’s ...”

“... had not been expected to become prime minister) were of priceless reassurance, probably all the more because they were heard and not seen. They created the warmth which the anxious Ministry craved. Freedman goes on to subdivide her subject ‘Four wartime needs predominate in verbal manoeuvres’: the need for silence, the need for humour, the need for ...”

“... section of the novel, is about a gang of teenage schoolfriends and brings to mind other novels of more or less the same period, when adolescence became a subject for fiction-writers: for Alain-Fournier in Le Grand Meaulnes, for Alec Waugh in The Loom of Youth, for Thomas Mann in ‘Tonio Kröger’. Szerb’s group centres ...”

“... down on the ground and attacked with spears. This summer’s elections were Congo’s first for more than forty years. No presidential candidate won an outright majority, so the people will go to the polls again on 29 October. In July, voter turnout was a remarkable 70 per cent. An elderly blind man at a polling station just south of Kilo told me he had ...”

“... Smiles’s creed, it was assumed, was Thatcherism of the crudest ‘on yer bike’ sort, all the more regrettable for being so far avant la lettre. Smiles was, in fact, a radical, sympathetic to Chartism, and a lifelong promoter of the rights of the working class. Yet because, until now, no one has come up with anything coherent to say about the positive ...”

“... the move was also encouraged by those Met patrons who collect new art and, although the museum has more than six million visitors a year, the prospect of an expanded audience was a prompt too. In addition, the deal gives the museum time to develop new spaces for modern and contemporary art back on Fifth Avenue, which are to be designed by David Chipperfield on ...”

“... Rococco artist who seems to be Mr Harris’s invention – and the subject of an earlier book – Thomas Robbins the Elder. By the end of the 18th century topography is firmly part of English landscape painting in the work of Richard Wilson, Gainsborough, Constable and Turner, all of whom are represented. The value of this book to architectural historians is ...”

“... outcome of these talks is easy to surmise: they will end with all the nuclear powers possessing more nuclear weapons than they did when the talks started. Once I would have worried about this also. Now I look forward to drinking the Perrier water even if the water talks succeed. To speak the truth, not an invariable practice with me, I do not care in the ...”

“... American languages; Byron’s ‘Imitation of Macpherson’s Ossian’; Goethe’s Werther; and Thomas Jefferson, who said that Ossian was better than Homer. It was also Ossian by way of Matthew Arnold who structured the Celtic Twilight in-Ireland and Scotland. Despite all this Macphcrson’s texts have been ignored for much of this century, partly because ...”

“... history of eschatology, life after death and the spiritual path explained by a Tibetan guru. Three more are in the New Age style or promoting New Age ideology. There are also essays by Proust and Timothy Leary and some Freudian texts. Between them, these dominate the list and are the most visible volumes of non-fiction in the windows of every ...”

“... conscious of the anachronistic nature of a siege. ‘Medieval?’ the sick Steevens asks. It’s more ancient than that. Sieges are out of date. In the days of Troy to be besieged was the natural lot of man: to give ten years at a stretch to it, why, it was all in a life’s work: then there was nothing else to do ... But to the man of 1899, with five ...”

“... it is proper to conclude that Holbein had borrowed them from Kratzer for his new painting; or, more exactly, since it does not seem that Holbein painted all the segments of this picture at the same time, that he has had them put on a carpeted tabletop, along with his job-lot of examples of earthly skills – music, arithmetic, geography – on the bottom ...”