“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Politics at the National Industrial Relations Court 1970-75 (Hart, £90) tells the story of John Donaldson, whose career might seem to provide an example of right-wing legal activism in the UK. As a young barrister in 1958, Donaldson co-wrote a policy paper produced by the Inns of Court Conservative and Unionist Society and given the title ‘A ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be shipped to Edmonton was transported to landfill sites in Essex and Huntingdon. Convoys took advantage of the M25, which increasingly functioned as an asteroid belt for London’s rubble, the unwanted mess of the building boom, the destruction of tower blocks, the frenzied creation of loft-living units along every waterway. We’re intrigued by ...”

“... claimed to reporters that the recovered ‘sarin’ was merely ‘anti-freeze’. The DIA paper took the arrests as evidence that al-Nusra was expanding its access to chemical weapons. It said Qassab had ‘self-identified’ as a member of al-Nusra, and that he was directly connected to Abd-al-Ghani, the ‘ANF emir for military manufacturing’. Qassab ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which drew its citizens from every civilised country, used French as its literary écu – and took Holland, land of tolerance and good publishers, as its capital. Within this efficient and cosmopolitan country of the mind, communications were remarkably good. The stock of a young author from a small provincial town in Brandenburg or Zeeland, once he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... scheme is that greyish green one was first conscious of 40 years ago when Canonbury and Islington took it up and then the National Trust: ‘tasteful green’ it might be called (it’s the colour of the coalhouse door in Yorkshire). It’s a definite spread – shop, restaurant, a cloister cum herb garden, together with barns, farm buildings and, one ...”

“... the ostentatious solemnity one finds in the liturgical minimalism of composers like Arvo Pärt and John Tavener. The Messiaen ‘cathedral’, if not exactly ecumenical, is vast, with plenty of room in the nave – as Edward Said noted – for ‘staunch secularists like myself’. The sixth movement of Vingt Regards, a turbulent fugue, is called ‘Par Lui ...”