“... not the sort historians have trained themselves to look for.’Demography is a particularly murky corner of early medieval history, but we know that between 500 and 1000 there was a trend of population decline and deurbanisation, the result of a degrading climate (the cold, arid period between the volcanic winter of 536 and 660 is sometimes called the Late ...”

“... small picture with a blazing message. The viewpoint is that of one seated on the bare floor in the corner of an attic studio with crumbling plaster walls. On the right, in shadow, is the doorway. In the centre, with its back to us, is an enormous easel with a picture propped on it. On the left, barely half the height of the easel, stands the painter, brush and ...”

“... tasty venue? ‘Upstairs at the Garage’, an evening of sponsored disobedience, just off Highbury Corner. The mob of liggers sweating in this toilet-box, slopping up orthodox doses of the black stuff, are confronted by an ironic account of the Class Warrior on the toot. And some of them don’t like it, they are there for the sounds, the freeform ...”

“... the adventurous, the polyglot, the pugilist, the dodgy lover has been thrown into an unregarded corner. Up in Valhalla with his favourite old Norsemen, he will not be taking much account of this neglect. Like many a fan, David Williams is inclined to patronise his hero, assuming an instinctive, intuitive understanding of his true nature, and encouraging ...”

“... Mrs Morel in Sons and Lovers – is rather more efficiently handled but is still far from expert. Paul overdoses his mother’s milk with her whole prescription of morphia tablets, which he and his sister have pulverised. Mrs Morel evidently guesses why her night-time drink is so bitter, but drinks nevertheless. This is in line with the drill laid down in ...”

“... she later identified as ‘a component of his talent: pursuing a topic until it was driven into a corner’. The photographer Walker Evans, who befriended her later in the decade, had a comparable intensity: he could ‘gaze at a single picture in silence for half an hour’. Evans took Sayre on long, unhurried walks through the city, wheeling her around to ...”

“... in her apartment, with its unframed Mondrian prints hanging on the wall, tennis rackets in one corner, fabrics, paints and plants in another. Nothing is rushed in this opening: we are simply encouraged, as always, to follow the rhythm of the characters, explore their world. At times Rohmer gives us a closer shot of Louise but more often the frame includes ...”

“... as the Bonheur studio evolved into a family enterprise with a clear chain of command. One visitor, Paul Delaroche, recalled: ‘There was nothing simpler and more touching than this household with its patriarchal ways.’ And yet, when her father urged her to sign her first works as Raimond, Bonheur refused: the name Rosa, she insisted, was more befitting of ...”

“... a Jesuit palaeontologist, is questioning Saint-Denis, the French colonial administrator of this corner of Chad. Tassin is looking for information about a mysterious figure called Morel, whose recent activities have scandalised all of French Equatorial Africa. Saint-Denis begins to recount lengthy conversations he had with people who recounted to him other ...”

“... with small stones to bind them. Then the remains of a lower wall running up against it, making the corner of a rectangle. I pull away moss and earth, and find a stone-paved floor, the hazel bushes growing up through it. I want it to be a fort or an ancient lookout, in line with the crannog, the tiny island fort, in the estuary below, but the fact it’s not ...”

“... the culture of the street: ‘Only the most tenuous of connections between us, looks on a street corner by strangers, a gesture of mutual respect based on our being young, black, male, based, in other words, on our being “brothers”.’ Not so brotherly now. Julius finds only distorted reflections of himself in his passport, since the first name on it ...”

“... daughter, Virginia, killed at the age of five by a truck while riding her tricycle past the corner gas station. He adds: ‘I felt an ultimate security, full licence and a horrible unforgettable boundary-less love. It ruined me and it made me.’ For this contaminated and contaminating love, Springsteen writes, ‘I abandoned my parents, my sister, and ...”

“... all this, it is hardly surprising to learn from the acknowledgments that he has been talking to Paul Auster, whose recent Oracle Night treats with some of the same topics. The Road to Delphi is very much Auster territory, emphasising the uncanny effects you can produce when you play Escheresque games with time and narrative, when the fuzzy prospect of an ...”

“... a crisis in historiography. ‘Monographism has taken over academic history and confined it to a corner of our culture where professors write books for other professors and review them in journals restricted to members of the profession.’ With some alarm he noted that ‘the disease must have infected me, for there I was, a former police reporter on the ...”

“... clearly signals hubris, since we know that there was to be more than one nasty surprise around the corner. The General Theory abruptly ceased to be compared with Newton’s Principia or Darwin’s Origin, those revolutionary texts generated by illustrious Cambridge predecessors. Instead, its scientific status came to seem comparable with that of an equally ...”