“... reduced a thriving forest-dwelling Indian population to beggary and degradation, the men street-corner drunks, their female children prostituted on the streets of Asuncion. In the case of the few tribes not already in touch with civilizados the first contact may be seen as an augury: missionaries bring medicine, but they also bring disease, disease to which ...”

“... with the Chinaman lasted almost two years. After the popular romances of Delly and the novels of Paul Bourget, Marguerite delved into Shakespeare and Molière. Her biographer suggests that the ‘purity’ of her style derives from her study of Madame de Lafayette and Racine, but this is hard to reconcile with the alleged influence of Bataille and ...”

“... exciting and illuminating juxtaposition between Jagger’s relief, No Man’s Land (1919-20), and Paul Nash’s Totes Meer (1940-41). It may be relevant that the theme is concrete for once. A lot more light will be thrown on the problem now that the Tate at Bankside has opened its doors and we start to see what the curators there have been able to do with the ...”

“... Take an old tram ticket, he suggests by way of example, ‘cut a square from its right-hand corner and you have an i-drawing.’ ‘This describes the discovery of an artistic structure in the non-artistic world and the creation of an artwork from this structure through delimitation alone.’ An ‘i’ composition is collage at its purest, a simple cut ...”

“... index was measured in units that corresponded to the rate of heat loss; one of the geographers, Paul Siple, later regretted this, as the use of units was often taken to imply that the index was an alternative temperature scale. This past winter a US-Canadian team unveiled a new wind chill index without the Celsius figure attached. In time, those numbers ...”

“... in which the truth can no longer be portrayed directly but can only be squinted at out of the corner of one’s eye, grasped only by bouncing one proposition against its opposite. Perhaps this is what Adorno had in mind when he called art a negative image of reality. Beckett’s language, which manages like some wounded animal to drag itself along when it ...”

“... pursued. Then I got twitchy when I read the petition written by Bernard-Henri Lévy, and signed by Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, William Shawcross, Claude Lanzmann, Salman Rushdie, Mike Nichols, Neil Jordan, and, to bring up the female numbers, Diane von Furstenberg, the Isabelles Adjani and Huppert, Yamani Benguigui, Danièle Thompson and Arielle Dombasle. It ...”

“... of that lifesize howitzer by Charles Sergeant Jagger on the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner. Arranged on obelisks are squadrons of engineless planes that will never achieve flight. Granite battleships hide in alcoves. Ghost armies perch on temporary plinths in a psychosexual romance of heavy cloaks, gas masks, boots and belts. I think of Walter ...”

“... the bag so hard he’d knocked it off its chain. Between bouts of writing, he retreated to a corner chair to smoke and to listen to his characters.Marion McClinton, the director of his later plays, called Wilson ‘the heavyweight champion’. He was referring to his great undertaking, but with his large forehead, broad chest and heavy-set frame Wilson ...”

“... to acquire a famous lover was finally satisfied by a rendezvous with the Duke of Wellington in the corner of a foreign field, near Brussels, in June 1815. Lady Frances’ hectic alternations of lust and shame continued to make her an alarming mistress, as Scrope Davies’s trunk, full of memorabilia, has recently disclosed. Scrope’s failure to take Byron’s ...”

“... was growing much stronger, and the hunting down of ‘collaborators’ seemed just round the corner. That Christmas, the last before the Liberation, the Holy Family had no little china marshals to protect them.The trial of Marshal Pétain began on 23 July 1945 and lasted until 15 August. The small Paris courtroom was crowded with lawyers, jurors and ...”

“... the work of Henry Treece and J. F. Hendry. For him, apocalypse was always in the air or round the corner, and he had ‘something in the nature of an apocalyptic experience’ when he came across a drawing by a five-year-old girl in which he instantly recognised a mandala, ‘a primordial symbol of psychic unity’, and reflected that there was still hope for ...”

“... long poem is continuing its revival, in the hands of younger poets such as Jeffrey Wainwright and Paul Muldoon; there has also recently been the odd case of John Fuller’s The Illusionists, a novel in the stanza of Eugene Onegin which expertly takes on much of the wit, melancholy and technical fluency of Pushkin’s poem. ‘Out for the Elements’ is also ...”

“... and then begins to ramble and bumble in his characteristic way, groping for a way out of the corner; sensing, visibly, that Hislop has got him on the ropes, he mentions some of the other things that he and Guppy discussed during that conversation, including their military heroes. And suddenly, Paul Merton interjects ...”

“... the intellectual. But he is also one of the few working American novelists – along with Paul Beatty, Lydia Millet, Mark Leyner, Mark Doten – truly committed to satire. The opening passage of The Ask compares America to a ‘run-down and demented pimp’ slumped in the corner of a pool hall, a novel image of ...”