“... Antrim (1901), a collection of slightly fey dialect poems, was much praised by the poet laureate, John Masefield, and set to music by the Irish composers Charles Villiers Stanford and Hamilton Harty. They were Edwardian popular songs of the sort that Bartell D’Arcy might have been asked to sing in ‘The Dead’, when he wasn’t having a go at ‘The Lass ...”

“... car to skid off the road and flip over, killing Metzger as well as himself. (Kligman survived and took up with Willem de Kooning.)Undeterred, Greenberg went on to steer more of his protégés to the Sullivan Institute. It soon became almost obligatory for artists seeking his approval to get a Sullivanian therapist: ‘There was pressure,’ the sculptor James ...”

“... garden his queasied voice squeezed like verjuice as he named the place and his black gown took the green shade of dried ink. I was chough, then, to his raven, an unequal match – nothing to boast of – between dark friends who’ve started to share the used rub of each other’s fixed and hardened edges. Now the smell of box and spicy bark is a ...”

“... It’s called A Gentle Occupation.’ She placed it carefully on the coffee-table before her, took up her glass and drained it. ‘Lunch is at one. Punctually. Do you like my hair?’ ... A man at the table beside us finished his meal, pushed himself up with the aid of a white stick, adjusted a green plastic eye-shade over his fore-head, and inched from ...”

“... for educational levels) was 50 per cent higher than elsewhere, and executives of financial firms took home two and a half times what their counterparts earned in other sectors. Some areas of finance have cartel-like features, including high barriers to the entry of potential competitors. Where retail banking, say, has seen some recent new entrants, creating ...”

“... novel about the content of these pictures. One showing a donor looking at a representation of St John baptising Christ is not very different in its basic theme from a painting by Titian half a century earlier. Donors were included, as they always had been, in order to invite the spectator to remember them when praying before the image. As the innkeeper in ...”

“... a seminary, first for Catholics and then for Anglicans. Although the fellowship included John Foxe, whose Actes and Monuments (1563) was, for several centuries, the bestselling English book after the Bible, there were few scholars of note. But then the purpose of Oxbridge colleges in the 16th and 17th centuries ‘was to impart knowledge, not to ...”

“... Knossos, Italian violins, paintings from Uccello to Gainsborough, intricate dead clocks. Like Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, the Ashmolean was its own exhibit: a museum to display an essentially 18th-century collectors’ museum. That’s all gone. Behind the mighty old façade, the new design is more like MoMA in Manhattan. Piranesi with the lights ...”

“... In September 2004, the German sculptor John Bock turned the main gallery at the ICA into something like a giant treehouse, a cluster of cabins, platforms and dens bashed together out of plywood and hung about with tinfoil, blankets and washing-lines. To get between them you’d climb ladders and squeeze through tunnels, balance on walkways and clamber over hay bales ...”

“... in the rock-leaved Bible of geology’. Those were the words of the pioneering geologist John Wesley Powell, who led the first expedition through the Grand Canyon in 1873. Thomas Moran, an experienced painter from Philadelphia, travelled with Powell, and had been to Wyoming and Montana with the US Geological and Geographical Survey two years ...”

“... South is too parodic to be true, and too true to be only a parody. His earlier work Erasure (2001) took us to the same territory, although not so far south, and with more precarious modes of balance. Some of the comedy was transformed into straight horror and many of the horrors were not parodic in the least. They were all the more desolate for being so ...”

“... condemned to a slow death by waning British commitment. It was around this time that an encounter took place between two outlooks almost equally marginal to the spirit of the times in Britain. Arthur C. Clarke, by now a well-established science fiction writer as well as the author of the pioneering paper on satellite communications, had been growing ...”

“... Britain’s application for entry to the Common Market as soon as he was in Downing Street, Heath took eighteen months to negotiate terms that were satisfactory to him and to Pompidou, a period probably extended by the need for Ireland and Denmark to do the same (Norway having opted out). The arithmetic in the Commons was not unfavourable. The Tories had 330 ...”

“... Aller, the brilliant scholar of China who was one of the chief ornaments of that address, later took his despair and disillusion to the length of self-slaughter. Most were more sanguine. I don’t especially remember Bill Clinton, perhaps because he was one of the more moderate and conciliatory types. But I remember several of his girlfriends and I remember ...”

“... came across: much of Hunky Dory consists of pastiches of Bowie’s musical heroes of the 1960s – John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Anthony Newley, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground. Which would make Ziggy Stardust the beautiful butterfly that emerged from the chrysalis. Paul Trynka begins his biography with a description of Bowie’s performance of ‘Starman’ on ...”